Jef Raskin was the father of the Macintosh. Many people probably know his name because of his recent, sudden, passing away (February 26, 2005). I was browsing his website, which remains online, and found a wealth of interesting material.
Jef was possibly the earliest well-known proponent of the use of graphics in a computer’s user interface; so early was his insight that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, originally, refused to listen to him. Here’s a footnote from his article, Will Computers Ever be Easy to Use?
… At first it was a concept too alien even for "visionaries." Without success I tried to explain the importance of graphical interfaces to Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the now-famous garage in 1976. I became their 31st employee in 1978 and the next year started a project to build a computer that I named "Macintosh" after my favorite apple, the McIntosh. At that time even Apple’s contemporaneous Lisa project was a character-generator-based system, though it soon adopted the graphics-only display architecture from the Mac. It is a little known fact that the Macintosh project was cancelled by Jobs, and I had to continue it unofficially until I could get it re-funded. To get his support, I helped maneuver Jobs (who was fond of saying that innovation could not come out of large companies) to visit Xerox PARC and see a GUI in action. It worked. However, I got more than his support–in 1982 Jobs… took over the Macintosh project….
Lots of interesting articles and ideas, not to mention history, at Jef’s site. Check it out.
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