Re: [NTLK] [OT] Father of the Mac dies-Straightening history

From: Alex Santos 100MB Neostrada Mail (izabella.misiewiczsantos_at_neostrada.pl)
Date: Fri Mar 04 2005 - 04:05:52 PST


Articles from Jef Raskin about the history of the Macintosh.

Either you believe Raskin or not, but his thesis published in 1967
should be sufficient. This is not his thesis but

http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html

'My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that
computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character
generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that
what you see on the screen should be what you get, and that the human
interface was more important than mere considerations of algorithmic
efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade
before PARC started. Many of the basic principles of the Mac were
firmly entrenched in my psyche. By the way, the name of my thesis was
the "Quick-Draw Graphics System", which became the name of (and part of
the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac.'

I don't know who brought the mouse but it may have been Raskin as it
was his project (the mac) which became official in late '78

'I was the 31st employee at Apple (joining in January, 1978), but I had
first met Jobs and Wozniak in their garage in 1976, and told them of
the wonderful work being done at PARC. Working on the Apple I at the
time, they weren't interested in human factors. While I was the first
PARC-savvy person at Apple, Larry Tesler was the first PARC employee to
join the company. At first he was strongly opposed to the Mac's
easier-to-use mouse methods, and I eventually wrote a memo that showed,
point by point, that the one-button mouse could do everything that
PARCs three-button mouse could do and with the same number or fewer
user actions. It was faster and more efficient, and much easier to
learn and remember how to use. I had observed that people (including
myself) at PARC often made wrong-button errors in using the mouse,
which was part of my impetus for doing better.'

MORE
http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html#recollections
http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html#moreFacts
http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/brucehorn.html

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