RIP: Jef Raskin

From ZD Net

Jef Raskin, Mac pioneer, dies at 61
Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61. Raskin, the author of The Humane Interface, died of cancer, according to a man who answered the telephone Sunday at Raskin's Pacifica, Calif., home. Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite fruit, joined Apple in January 1978 as employee No. 31. The Macintosh was launched in 1984, but Raskin left Apple in 1982 amid a well-documented dispute with Steve Jobs. Raskin was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when he first visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). (Apple is often accused of copying Xerox's graphical user interface--GUI--into the Macintosh operating system). "When PARC was in its first few years I was often a visiting academic there, taking part in discussions and viewing with delight some of the developments going on there; I trust that people there also took pleasure in finding in me someone who was already on much the same user-interface wavelength," Raskin later wrote. "I didn't have to be sold on the idea that UI and graphics were of primary importance to the future of computing." Raskin said he told Jobs and Steve Wozniak about what he had seen at Xerox the first time he met them in their garage in 1976, and that he stopped visiting Xerox when he went to work for Apple "to avoid any possible conflicts of interest."

Another project that Raskin worked on was the Canon Cat -- this one was pure genius. A very simple to operate office machine that could handle word processing and spreadsheets and with a very innovative use of a text display with sprites (non alphanumeric characters) to draw rulers and boxes. When you were done, you shut the power switch off -- this triggered the computer to save all open files, save where you were and then shut down. When you powered up, you would resume where you were. Very intuitive system and it's a shame that they never took off -- Canon never marketed them that well because their management was stuck in the Office Business Machines mind-set instead of the Computers can do evertyhing... UPDATE: WikiPedia has a nice if short artcle on Jef along with a good picture of him. They also link to other articles, interviews, etc... They also have an article on the Canon Cat