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Jef Raskin (born Jeff Raskin; March 9, 1943 – February 26, 2005) was an American human–computer interface expert who conceived and began leading the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s.
Raskin later enrolled in a graduate music program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), but quit to teach art, photography, and computer science there. He worked as an assistant professor in the Visual Arts department from 1968 until 1974. There, he presented shows about toys as works of art. Raskin announced his resignation from the assistant professorship by flying over the Chancellor's house in a hot air balloon. He was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to establish a Computer and Humanities center, which used several 16-bit Data General Nova computers and Cathode-ray tube, rather than the more common Teletype .
Along with his undergraduate student Jonathan (Jon) Collins, Raskin developed the FLOW programming language for use in teaching programming to the art and humanities students. The language was first used at the Humanities Summer Training Institute held in 1970 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. The language has only seven statements (, GET IT, PRINT IT, PRINT "text", JUMP TO, IF IT IS " " JUMP TO, and STOP) and can not manipulate numbers. The language was first implemented in Fortran by Collins in under a week. Later versions of the language utilized "typing amplification" in which only the first letter is typed and the computer provides the balance of the instruction eliminating typing errors. It was also the basis for programming classes taught by Raskin and Collins in the UCSD Visual Arts Department.
Raskin curated several art shows including one featuring his collection of unusual toys, and presenting toys as works of art. During this period, he changed the spelling of his name from "Jeff" to "Jef" after having met Jon Collins and liking the lack of extraneous letters.
Raskin occasionally wrote for computer publications, such as Dr. Dobb's Journal. He formed a company named Bannister and Crun, which was named for two characters playing in the BBC radio comedy The Goon Show.
From his responsibility for documentation and testing, Raskin had great influence on early engineering projects. Because the Apple II only displayed uppercase characters on a 40-column screen, his department used the PolyMorphic Systems 8813 (an Intel-8080-based machine running a proprietary operating system called Exec) to write documentation; this spurred the development of an 80-column display card and a suitable text editor for the Apple II. His experiences testing Applesoft BASIC inspired him to design a competing product, called Notzo BASIC, which was never implemented. When Wozniak developed the first Disk storage for the Apple II, Raskin went back to his contacts at UCSD and encouraged them to port the UCSD UCSD Pascal operating system, which incorporated a version of the Pascal programming language. Apple later licensed and shipped it as Apple Pascal.
Through this time, Raskin continually wrote memos about how the personal computer could become a true consumer appliance. While the Apple III was under development in 1978 and '79, Raskin was lobbying for Apple to create a radically different kind of computer that was designed from the start to be easy to use. In Computers by the Millions, he stated that expandable computers like the Apple II were too complex, and development was difficult due to the unknown nature of the machine the program ran on. The machine he envisioned was very different from the Macintosh that was eventually released and had much more in common with PDAs than modern desktop metaphor-based machines.
The prototype was similar in power to the Apple II and included a small black-and-white character Cathode-ray tube and floppy drive, in a small case. It was text only, as Raskin disliked the computer mouse or anything else that could take his hands from the keyboard. Several basic applications were built into the machine, selectable by pressing function keys. The machine included logic to understand user intentions and switch programs dynamically. For instance, if the user simply started typing text it switched into editor mode, and if numbers are typed it switched to calculator mode. In many cases these switches were largely invisible to the user.
In 1981, after the Apple Lisa team had "kicked him out", Steve Jobs's attention drew toward Raskin's Macintosh project, intending to combine the Xerox PARC-inspired GUI-based Lisa design to Raskin's appliance-computing, "computers-by-the-millions" concept. Steve Wozniak, who around then had been co-leading the Macintosh team with Raskin, was on hiatus from the company following a traumatic airplane accident, allowing Jobs to take managerial lead over the project.
Raskin is credited as one of the first to introduce Jobs and the Lisa engineers to the PARC concepts, though he ultimately dismissed PARC's technology and opposed the use of the mouse. Raskin claimed to have had continued direct input into the eventual Mac design, including the decision to use a one-button mouse as part of the Apple interface, instead of PARC's 3-button mouse. Others, including Larry Tesler, acknowledge his advocacy for a one-button mouse but say that it was a decision reached simultaneously by others at Apple who had stronger authority on the issue. Raskin later stated that were he to redesign the mouse, it would have three clearly labeled buttons—two buttons on top marked "Select" and "Activate", and a "Grab" button on the side that could be used by squeezing the mouse. The Humane Interface Appendix A, Pg. 209, last paragraph It has the three described buttons (two invisible), but they are assigned to different functions than Raskin specified for his own interface and can be customized.
In 2005, Macintosh project member Andy Hertzfeld remembered Raskin's reputation for often inaccurately claiming to have invented various technologies. Raskin's resume from 2002 lends credence by stating he was "Creator of Macintosh computer at Apple Computer, Inc." Raskin conceived and solely supervised the Macintosh project for approximately its first year; however, Hertzfeld describes Raskin's relationship to the drastically different finished Mac product more like that of an "eccentric great uncle" than its father. In Jobs's "Lost Interview" from 1996, he refers to the Macintosh as a product of team effort while acknowledging Raskin's early role. Jobs reportedly co-opted some of Raskin's leadership philosophies, such as when he wrote the slogan on the Macintosh group's easel, "It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy."
Apple acknowledged Raskin's role after he had left the company by gifting him the millionth Macintosh computer, with an engraved brass plaque on the front.
Raskin wrote a book, The Humane Interface (2000),Raskin, Jef 2000. The Humane Interface, Addison-Wesley in which he developed his ideas about human-computer interfaces.
Raskin was a long-time member of BAYCHI, the Bay-Area Computer-Human Interface group, a professional organization for human-interface designers. He presented papers on his own work, reviewed the human interfaces of various consumer products (such as a BMW car he'd been asked to review), and discussed the work of his colleagues in various companies and universities.
At the start of the new millennium, Raskin undertook the building of a new computer interface based on his 30 years of work and research, called The Humane Environment, THE. On January 1, 2005, he renamed it Archy. It is a system incarnating his concepts of the humane interface, by using open source elements within his rendition of a ZUI or Zooming User Interface. In the same period, Raskin accepted an appointment as adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Chicago's Computer Science Department and, with Leo Irakliotis, started designing a new curriculum on humane interfaces and computer enterprises.
His work is being extended and carried on by his son Aza Raskin at Humanized, a company that was started shortly after Raskin's death to continue his legacy. Humanized released Enso, a linguistic command-line interface, which is based on Jef's work and dedicated in his memory. In early 2008, Humanized became part of Mozilla.
The Archy project never included a functional ZUI, but a third party developed a commercial application called Raskin inspired by the same Zoomworld ZUI idea.
The term cognetics had earlier been coined and trademarked by Charles Kreitzberg in 1982 when he started Cognetics Corporation, one of the first user experience design companies. It is also used to describe educational programs intended to foster thinking skills in grades 3-12 (US)Burr, J. et al., Cognetics: Thinking Skills Activities in Inventions/Technology and Science. Teacher's Manual and Student Manual. Philadelphia, PA: RBS Publications, 1992. and for Cognetics, Inc., an economic research firm founded by David L. Birch, a professor at MIT.
Raskin discouraged using the informal term "intuition" in user interface design, claiming that easy to use interfaces are often due to exposure to previous, similar systems, thus the term "familiar" should be preferred. Aiming for "intuitive" interfaces (based on reusing existing skills with interaction systems) could lead designers to discard a better design solution only because it would require a novel approach.
He was an accomplished Archery, target shooter, bicycle racer and an occasional model race car driver. He was a musician and composer, publishing a series of collected recorder studies using the pseudonym of Aabel Aabius. In his later years he also wrote Freelancer articles for Macintosh magazines, such as Mac Home Journal, and many modeling magazines, Forbes, Wired, and computing journals. One of his favorite pastimes was to play music with his children. He accompanied them on the piano while they played or sang while going through old Lead sheet passed down from his father. They routinely improvised together.
Raskin owned Jef's Friends, a small company which made model airplane kits.
He was a toy designer. He designed Space Expander, a hanging cloth maze for a person to walk through. He designed Bloxes, a set of interlocking wood blocks.
One of Raskin's instruments was the organ. In 1978 he published an article in BYTE on using computers with the instrument.
Raskin published a paper highly critical of pseudoscience in nursing, such as therapeutic touch and Rogerian science, wherein he said: "Unlike science, nursing theory has no built-in mechanisms for rejecting falsehoods, tautologies, and irrelevancies."
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2004 and died in Pacifica, California, on February 26, 2005, at age 61.
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