“There's no doubt that Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, and that his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy to use, low cost, high volume appliance computer got the ball rolling, and remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then hiring amazing individuals like Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman and Brian Howard for the Macintosh team. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Macintosh that we know and love is very different than the computer that Jef wanted to build, so much so that he is much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh's father.
Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle), there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.”
In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct:
JR: No. I designed it to be graphical from the ground up. But the text portions of the interface, which I also cared about, would have been cleaner. People have put together my dislike of the mouse (confusing dislike for a particular input device with dislike for graphic input devices in general; I personally prefer trackballs and tablets) and my careful attention to text handling to a false legend of my wanting a text-based machine. Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.
History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III.
Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.
The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place.
Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.)
I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.
The defining aspect of the Macintosh for me will always be the mandatory GUI - most everything else had it as either an entire afterthought, or at least as a “program started later”.
Lisa 2 was cheaper than many later Macs, but the Mac folks seemed to have little interest in convergent evolution for the platforms or in integrating Lisa features like memory protection into the Mac. The result was that Lisa died as the Macintosh XL (ex-Lisa), with a Mac compatibility environment (MacWorks, which looked terrible with the stock Lisa rectangular pixels but better with a "Screen Kit" square pixel upgrade) as a consolation prize, while Mac users had to wait until Mac OS X for memory protection. Ultimately the Lisa hardware was able to run 68K versions of Mac OS through 7.6.1 in 1997.
I think it was in one of the On the Metal interviews where one of the guests mentions MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.
Assuming the Mac folks had no interest in converging the platform in favour of the Lisa is somewhat unfair. While it sounds like some code was shared between the two platforms, the Lisa's operating system was quite different. It would have been difficult to make Lisa software operate under the Macintosh System Software. To my knowledge, there was virtually no software for the Lisa anyhow. Breaking software compatibility on the Macintosh to get the benefits of Lisa would have been a terrible business decision.
Aside from that, the MMU in the Lisa would have been a custom solution which Apple would have to support. When Motorola introduced an MMU, it was for 68020 generation machines. Apple should have been able to introduce memory protection at that point, but didn't. One of the reasons was that Apple struggled to make that next generation operating system while retaining compatibility with existing software (albeit, memory protection may have been only one of many problems). This was by no means a problem exclusive to Apple. Other platforms ran into similar issues.
Apple doesn't seem to have leveraged or combined work on (Lisa, Lisa Smalltalk, Lisa Xenix, Mac OS, A/UX, ...) as successfully as they might have. As you note, protected memory was deferred to multiple failed Mac OS successor projects (Pink/Taligent, Copland/NuKernel, etc.)
Ultimately Apple gave up, acquired Steve Jobs and NeXT, and eventually successfully migrated the Mac platform to an OS with memory protection.
Since then however Apple's OS and hardware strategy has been much more coherent, with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. sharing code, and sharing SoC technology as well. Ironically this is similar to Microsoft's "Windows [NT] everywhere" strategy.
That delay in shipping a memory-protected Mac was probably originally at least as much the result of upper-management politics as anything else. After Jobs left Apple Gassée cancelled Jobs’ pet project, the Big Mac which was intended to run Mac applications on a Unix base. Big Mac project leader Rich Page (and IIRC some other project members) rang Steve Jobs begging him to do something, and the rest is history.
Jef's vision for a high volume appliance computer was eventually realized in the Canon Cat which he co-created with Canon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
Vision may spark greatness, but execution is what makes it real. The Hacker News crowd can debate endlessly about who conceived the Macintosh while dumping on Steve Jobs.
But Steve Jobs did what ultimately mattered: he shipped.
That was my exact thought when I read the submission’s title. Thank you for finding and posting the article.
This interview does seem to have a comment about it:
> Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.
Jef did go on to create a computer along the lines of his original vision after leaving Apple.
> The Canon Cat used a text-based user interface, without any pointer, mouse, icons, or graphics. All data was seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command-line interface or menu system, the Cat used its special keyboard, with commands activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key.
It is, kind of. The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does.
When Raskin was active, there was a whole industry selling "word processors", special purpose computers that just did text processing. Wang and IBM were the biggest makers. The IBM PC was descended from the IBM Displaywriter and used the same monitor. So at the time, word processing looked like the core desktop computer function.
So Raskin perfected the word processor interface. What he didn't get was that computing was not going to stop at word processors.
> The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does.
Everything I've read suggested that Raskin intended it to be programmable from the beginning, using Forth. Other descriptions suggested that, while document oriented, it was not intended to be exclusively oriented towards word processing. At least not in the sense of the (dedicated) word processors of the day. That said, I'm not surprised that user interaction was keyboard based. The project had it's origins around 1978/79. It would be about 5 years until computers were sufficiently powerful to support a coherent GUI at a reasonable price.
It looked like a mere word processor, but—much like Emacs, especially org-mode—the Canon Cat was actually contextually aware of what the text meant, and allowed other operations to be performed on it as appropriate. For example, if you start typing numbers into tables, spreadsheet-like functionality became available, including the ability to perform mathematical operations over those numbers and have cells dynamically updated with the new values. Raskin called it a "work processor".
The Forth language was available for programming and extending the machine, via a cheatcode. You had to type in the phrase "enable the Forth language" and evaluate it with a special command or something—you know, one of those things to provide hackability for those who needed such while keeping it an office appliance for the vast majority of users. I don't know if there was an intent for a market or library of third-party software, but that doesn't seem to have arisen.
Behind the Mac, as in, behind the Mac as it actually shipped, no. His ideas had little to do with it - it was almost entirely stuff designed by others when he was out of the project.
This concept of a story has been on HN so many times. It always starts with this technically correct but actually misleading headline fragment. Misleading clickbait works, even here. Every time.
Fav quote:
"I have made changes in the world that are beyond what most people thought was possible, and I hope that my judgment continues to be good as to what is possible to change and what is not."
Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.
Way back when I worked at HP in the Software Development Technology Lab, we invited a series of speakers to talk about their view of technology.
We had folks such as Jef Raskin, Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart, James Burke. All quite fascinating & inspiring people.
Jef brought a Cannon Cat and discussed his views on User Interfaces & more. The MPE OS engineering guys were rather sarcastic in hearing his methodology around the OS approach of the CAT.
Yeah that's a really stiff interview to publish, it reads like the interviewer pulled up to him while he was eating lunch and peppered him with questions.
Sometimes these interviews are done via a single email filled with questions and are not performed in-person, so the answer of a question isn't always carried forward into future questions, which can seem awkward from afar.
It's not a great interview and it's sad that Raskin passed a month later.
> JW: The original Mac was to be sold for $600. When it finally arrived it cost $2,500 and today the cheapest Mac is $699. Is this a disappointment to you?
> JR: Which? the $2,500, the $699? It was never supposed to be $600.
His research work was pretty foundational. Highly recommend his book! It’s timeless, especially since he did his explorations in a time before users were already “poisoned” by existing concepts and expectations - which is also a topic in his book.
Jef was a huge proponent of incremental search. That hasn't become mainstream-ubiquitous, but it is certainly code-editor-ubiquitous. Jef being an extremist, he wanted incremental search as the only mechanism for moving the cursor.
I have tried editing using only incremental search, and it was awful right up until the moment when I reached for it first instead of wanting a mouse or arrow key and then remembering I was only supposed to use incremental search.
From that moment on, I sailed along just fine. Does that mean it might have "won?" Certainly not, but all the same... Success in software design is absolutely not any kind of meritocracy outside of the tautological "If it won, it must have merit, winning is the metric for merit."
“There's no doubt that Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, and that his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy to use, low cost, high volume appliance computer got the ball rolling, and remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then hiring amazing individuals like Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman and Brian Howard for the Macintosh team. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Macintosh that we know and love is very different than the computer that Jef wanted to build, so much so that he is much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh's father.
Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle), there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.”
JR: No. I designed it to be graphical from the ground up. But the text portions of the interface, which I also cared about, would have been cleaner. People have put together my dislike of the mouse (confusing dislike for a particular input device with dislike for graphic input devices in general; I personally prefer trackballs and tablets) and my careful attention to text handling to a false legend of my wanting a text-based machine. Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.
Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.
Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.)
I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.
I think it was in one of the On the Metal interviews where one of the guests mentions MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.
Aside from that, the MMU in the Lisa would have been a custom solution which Apple would have to support. When Motorola introduced an MMU, it was for 68020 generation machines. Apple should have been able to introduce memory protection at that point, but didn't. One of the reasons was that Apple struggled to make that next generation operating system while retaining compatibility with existing software (albeit, memory protection may have been only one of many problems). This was by no means a problem exclusive to Apple. Other platforms ran into similar issues.
Since then however Apple's OS and hardware strategy has been much more coherent, with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. sharing code, and sharing SoC technology as well. Ironically this is similar to Microsoft's "Windows [NT] everywhere" strategy.
This seems really extreme. You're saying a trackpad would have made the whole thing a failure?
Vision may spark greatness, but execution is what makes it real. The Hacker News crowd can debate endlessly about who conceived the Macintosh while dumping on Steve Jobs.
But Steve Jobs did what ultimately mattered: he shipped.
This interview does seem to have a comment about it:
> Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.
> The Canon Cat used a text-based user interface, without any pointer, mouse, icons, or graphics. All data was seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command-line interface or menu system, the Cat used its special keyboard, with commands activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
It was nothing like the Macintosh Apple shipped.
Jasper:
https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/jasper/
https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-jasper-report
bitters:
https://m15o.ichi.city/bitters/
https://nightfall.city/nex/in/m15o/projects/bitters/ (very similar to the link above, but Nex is a neat protocol...)
https://sr.ht/~m15o/bitters/
Furthermore, Internet Archive hosts a runnable Canon Cat Emulation. I believe this means it is available in MAME as well.
https://archive.org/details/canoncat
When Raskin was active, there was a whole industry selling "word processors", special purpose computers that just did text processing. Wang and IBM were the biggest makers. The IBM PC was descended from the IBM Displaywriter and used the same monitor. So at the time, word processing looked like the core desktop computer function.
So Raskin perfected the word processor interface. What he didn't get was that computing was not going to stop at word processors.
Everything I've read suggested that Raskin intended it to be programmable from the beginning, using Forth. Other descriptions suggested that, while document oriented, it was not intended to be exclusively oriented towards word processing. At least not in the sense of the (dedicated) word processors of the day. That said, I'm not surprised that user interaction was keyboard based. The project had it's origins around 1978/79. It would be about 5 years until computers were sufficiently powerful to support a coherent GUI at a reasonable price.
The Forth language was available for programming and extending the machine, via a cheatcode. You had to type in the phrase "enable the Forth language" and evaluate it with a special command or something—you know, one of those things to provide hackability for those who needed such while keeping it an office appliance for the vast majority of users. I don't know if there was an intent for a market or library of third-party software, but that doesn't seem to have arisen.
At the end of the article it reads:
> This article was first published on 2005.01.19.
It’s also evidenced by the reference to the “new iMac G5.”
https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
A short must-read for people designing (via prompt or any other tool) user experiences. It is timeless (so far!)
Behind the Macintosh project, yes.
Behind the Mac, as in, behind the Mac as it actually shipped, no. His ideas had little to do with it - it was almost entirely stuff designed by others when he was out of the project.
He was a fun person to chat with, lots of great ideas and the drive to work out the details.
We had folks such as Jef Raskin, Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart, James Burke. All quite fascinating & inspiring people.
Jef brought a Cannon Cat and discussed his views on User Interfaces & more. The MPE OS engineering guys were rather sarcastic in hearing his methodology around the OS approach of the CAT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface
Left the strong impression that Jeff thought him an idiot and his questions leave the reader feeling Jeff might be right.
> JW: The original Mac was to be sold for $600. When it finally arrived it cost $2,500 and today the cheapest Mac is $699. Is this a disappointment to you?
> JR: Which? the $2,500, the $699? It was never supposed to be $600.
Like.. terrible question, annoyed interview subject.
It’s been over a decade since the interview. Anyone familiar with anything Raskin was working then that is ubiquitous now?
I have tried editing using only incremental search, and it was awful right up until the moment when I reached for it first instead of wanting a mouse or arrow key and then remembering I was only supposed to use incremental search.
From that moment on, I sailed along just fine. Does that mean it might have "won?" Certainly not, but all the same... Success in software design is absolutely not any kind of meritocracy outside of the tautological "If it won, it must have merit, winning is the metric for merit."
He may be the man who started the Macintosh project, but Steve Jobs saved the Mac from him.