Jef Raskin RIP

Jef Raskin, the original force behind Apple's Macintosh, died this weekend. I interviewed Jef a couple years ago, when I was working on a project on the history of the Macintosh for the Stanford Library. At the time, Jef was working for some dot-com, and his office was just across the street from Apple world headquarters (ironically); his book The Humane Interface had either just come out, or was about to.

The first time we met, we sat in his office (at Telocity, I think) for a couple hours, talking about his background and work on the Mac; we then had lunch, and Jef mainly talked about model planes. As an oral historian, I tend to default to listening mode around people I'm interested in; but I get the sense that in most conversations, Jef probably did most of the talking. He had a vast array of interests, and pursued some of them very seriously: his home office was tucked away behind what looked like a machine shop and small airplane assembly plant, and upstairs was a small pipe organ.

I visited his house a couple times, to go through his papers-- mainly a fruitless search for a memo that either he wrote to refute Larry Tesler's argument in favor of multibutton mice, or that Larry wrote to refute Jef's argument in favor of multibutton mice (each was pretty sure he had written it, but neither could find a copy any longer)-- and talk about The Humane Interface, which was already getting some pretty positive coverage. During one of those visits, in order to make good use of the time, I ended up doing part of an interview with him while he drove his kids to music lessons in San Francisco. Getting folded into a family's routine is not the sort of thing that usually happens when you do an interview.

Jef had a reputation for being arrogant, brusque, and generally having a poor interface (ironic, given his work). He struck me very impatient with the stupidity of the world, and certain in many of his opinions; but I also found him a lot more likeable, and friendly in a gruff kind of way, than I expected. Basically, anyone who spent any time around academics or scientists would have recognized the personality type. And it is impossible to argue with his basic claim that computers are still a lot harder to use than they should be, and that many of the fixes are pretty straightforward, but not done because of established practice, legacy code, or because most computer companies don't really care about users.

Jef had co-founded a Center for Humane Interfaces that recently got some seed money. I don't know what's going to happen to it, but the world will be the worse if his ideas don't catch on.

Jef is the second Mac veteran I interviewed who has died since the project: Jim Sachs, one of the developers of the Apple mouse, died in 2002. Having worked mainly on Victorian science, where your subjects are safely gone, I find it's a disconcerting thing. Jim and Jef were extremely different, but arguably they were two of the most brilliant people to work on the Mac, and deserve to be remembered more prominently as thinkers and contributors to the evolution of the computer. I suppose in some small way those interviews will help.