Jef Raskin , the booster cable designer of the first Macintosh computer and a trailblazer in the development of user interface , died Saturday at age 61 . He had been name recently with pancreatic genus Cancer , his family tell in a statement .
Raskin joined Apple in 1978 as employee number 31 and headed the company ’s Macintosh ontogeny team from its founding until 1982 . He refer the labor after his favourite type of apple , shift the spelling for copyright reasons .
He is accredit with significantly advancing the design of user interfaces , which in the early 1980s were largely textbook - establish and required users to memorize complex program line . Raskin convinced his peers at Apple that to turn over a wider consultation , the Macintosh necessitate an interface that was elegant and well-situated to utilize .
“ Up to that metre , at Apple and most other manufacturer , the conception was to offer the latest and most brawny ironware , and let the users and third - company software vendors figure out how to make it usable , ” he write later on his WWW site .
Raskin left Apple in 1982 , two years before the Macintosh went on sales event , but he proceed to regulate the design of computers through his committal to writing , lectures and consulting employment . Soon after leaving the caller he founded Information Appliance Inc. , where he design the Canon Cat computer for Canon USA Inc. , although the product was not a commercial-grade success .
His consult clients have included Intel Corp. , Hewlett - Packard Co. , IBM Corp. and many other big name in computing . In 2000 he published a record book , “ The Humane Interface , ” that is widely assigned at university .
Raskin was presently at workplace on a project called Archy , where he hop to put many of the estimation expressed in his book into package . Archy use simple-minded commands for vulgar operations in give-and-take processing and e - mail , but “ does n’t work like anything else on this or nearby planets , ” think of users would have to larn it from mark , he wrote on his WWW land site .
His Logos , Aza Raskin , will go along to develop the project , a preview version of which is due out later this year , his home say in the command .
Raskin ’s interests were not restrain to computers : He taught the recorder , cembalo and euphony theory at San Francisco Community College in the 1970s , and his family described him as an orchestral soloist and composer . He also establish a company that contrive and sell radio - insure model aircraft .
Along with Aza , he is survived by his married woman , Linda Blum , and his other children , Aviva and Aenea , as well as Rebecca Fureigh and Jenna Mandis . Raskin dwell most of late in Pacifica , Calif.
More information about Jef Raskin is available at his Web site , www.jefraskin.com . More information about Archy is atwww.raskincenter.org .
Other Jef Raskin stories on Macworld : Macworld Expo kicks off with 20 years on the Mac Pro File : Mac Daddy — Q&A with JEF RASKIN Mac creators utter about Jobs , OS disco biscuit at MacHack A Mac Family Reunion ‘ Father of the Mac ’ discuss the future of interfaces Wozniak ’s hearth chat
