Father of the Macintosh, Jef Raskin passes away
February 28th, 2005 Leave a comment Visited 74 times, 1 so far today
Father of the Macintosh, Jef Raskin passes away
The man highly regarded as the father of the revolutionary Macintosh computer passed away on Friday peacefully. Jef Raskin was Apple’s #31 employee who was a professor by education but turned consultant. He wrote the Apple II’s BASIC manual in 1976 and later joined the same company 2 years later. Some years later, he envisioned the Macintosh computer as a departure from computers of those days.
This suggestion was strongly opposed by the Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs but was approved nonetheless. The basic idea was to enclose the computer in a single compartment rather than to get users to mess around with slots and cables. The original targeted price was a modest USD 500-1000 dollar computer, which ballooned to a massive USD 5000 price tag after Steve Jobs, took the project from the research table to the full-scale production level.
He left the company in 1982 after feeling left out by the company and the interference of Steve Jobs. He later started a new company Information Appliance Inc. that never really took off or achieved its goal of making a computer, which Jef initially envisioned.
He was also a big critic of the User Interfaces of the Operating System of current generation claiming that little had evolved since the early 1980’s. It included even the latest Operating System from Apple OS X. he also authored books like ‘The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems’.
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February 28th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
He was also an accomplished musician. Another brilliant man forced out by Jobs as he built Apple into what it is today…closer than ever to becoming a tiny Microsoft.
February 28th, 2005 at 6:40 pm
There are a couple of interesting things here.
1. In most pancreatic cancer it is fatal with 3-9 months (around 28950 out of 29000 per year). When I saw how quickly he died, I guessed it was from pancreatic cancer before reading the ABC news article. ( http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=536750)
2. Steve Jobs had the ‘better’ form of pancreatic cancer (the more treatable kind) last year. Islet cell. It is somewhat ironic that both had some form of pancreatic cancer.
3. My mom passed away from it in April 1999 and I was one of the founding Board of directors of the leading Pancreatic Cancer charity – see
http://www.pancan.org/ for ways you can help from volunteering to anything.