When I first heard the news that Jef Raskin had break down , my mind flashed back to last July ’s Macworld Expo in Boston , when Raskin link fellow Mac innovator Bill Atkinson , Andy Hertzfeld , and Jerry Manock in a keynote panel word lead by David Pogue of theNew York Times .
When the session begin , I ’d wager that most of the audience had never heard of Raskin , or at the very least experience about him only peripherally . perhaps they had read the Raskin interview in Macworld , but that was believably about it .
But 78 minutes later , as the consultation filed out of the hall , everyone was thinking and talking about Jef Raskin . That ’s because Raskin , who was never on the dot a shrinking reddish blue , had lit up the crowd — and the control board . There were some hisses and boos when Raskin declared that the Mac had “ gone from madly great to insanely gross . ” Me , I chortle , because I knew Raskin was delighted that he had incur a raise out of the Mac close .
The point of much of Raskin ’s post - Apple work was not that the Mac was terrible — in fact , later on in the academic term in Boston he pointed out that the Mac is probably the best interface we ’ve get today . Rather , it was that the current crop of operating - system of rules interfaces are not honorable enough at their jobs , and to make computers easier to use will need the renunciation of some principle we all take for granted . He loved shocking those Mac exploiter out of their complacency .
Of course , Raskin also make on the nerve of his fellow panelists in that session . Raskin clearly had a high judgement of himself and his work , and was not afraid to partake that opinion in public . But several panelists seemed frustrated by Raskin and suggested that it was not entirely correct for him to take so much credit for the creation of the Mac . From the expression on their grimace ( I was there , second row gist ) it seemed that Atkinson and Hertzfeld hadheard his claims of conception before , and were tired of it .
The way I figured it at the time was this : if you genuinely believed that you were the creator of an innovative small-arm of technology like the Mac , and you saw the reference for the invention of that machine buy the farm to someone you had bass disagreements with ( Steve Jobs ) , you really had two alternative : Be modest and accept that only the real in - the - know people would ever give you the credit you merit , or shout from the rooftops that established wiseness had it wrong and that you , not Steve Jobs , were the discoverer of the Mac . Raskin ’s approach was the latter , and I suppose I ca n’t fault him for it .
But on the occasion of his destruction , it is encouraging to see that at least in some quarters , Raskin is being given some of the credit entry he had been saying he deserved all along . Did Jef Raskin really come to Apple with the Mac full - blown in his point , a statement that would imply that all of the talented people on the original Mac team were just there to enforce his unique vision ? I doubt it . But there is little doubt that he was one of the keystone , if notthekey shape in the world of the engineering science that became the Mac .
If you ’re interested in hearing that illustrious Macworld Expo control board treatment , we ’re making an MP3 of the school term uncommitted for a limited time . It ’s 78 minutes long and weighs in at 18 megabit , so be warn .
Download the Macworld Expo Boston 2004 Keynote MP3.(If you need other people to mind to this file , please manoeuver them to this entry rather than straight at the MP3 file . Thanks . )
Want more level about Jef Raskin ’s piece of work with the original Mac team ? Visit theJef Raskin pages at folklore.org , Hertzfeld ’s fantabulous site about the history of the Mac .
