Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

5/30/2026 at 8:16:42 PM

https://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html:

“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.”

by Someone

5/30/2026 at 8:53:19 PM

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.

by adrian_b

5/30/2026 at 11:00:36 PM

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.

by simondotau

5/31/2026 at 12:36:38 AM

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.

by II2II

5/31/2026 at 6:38:26 PM

> While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III

Made me look it up! I was developing Apple ][/III/Lisa/Mac software at the time. I used the Apple III to write Apple Pascal for the Apple ][, and the Lisa to develop for the Mac. I'd completely forgotten the initial pricing of the Apple III, which was stratospheric. The $7,800 config was 256K I think (~$31K in today's dollars).

"It sold initially for between $4,340 and $7,800, depending on the configuration. The original Apple III had many problems, and was replaced by a revised model in mid 1981, which featured 256K RAM, updated system software, and a lower price ($3495). A 5 MB external hard disk was also made available. The Apple /// sold very poorly and was replaced by the Apple ///+ ($2995) in Late 1983. The Apple ///+ was discontinued in 1985."

https://apple-history.com/aiii

by getpost

5/31/2026 at 2:55:35 AM

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”.

by bombcar

5/31/2026 at 10:44:46 AM

The mandatory graphic GUI - and MacPaint - made the point that the Mac was primarily a visual design tool that happened to handle text.

That was absolutely revolutionary.

S-100 systems and the early PCs were primarily text systems that sometimes happened to do crude graphics.

The original Apple II tried to do graphics but the tech to do it properly just didn't exist. And the underlying UI was still text based.

Raskin's Mac vision didn't make that leap. It wasn't just about the mouse, it was about the philosophy of the product. Raskin wanted text-but-cheaper-and-better, Jobs wanted pictures and art.

by TheOtherHobbes

5/31/2026 at 11:48:53 AM

> The mandatory graphic GUI...

What do you reckon the "G" in GUI stands for, out of curiosity?

by michaelcampbell

5/31/2026 at 10:40:53 AM

And perhaps most critically, other semi-GUI platforms made lesser attempts to demand consistency.

by simondotau

5/31/2026 at 11:40:37 AM

Early on, sure. I seem to recall Apple having their Human Interface Guidelines early on, which helped, yet there were developers who were either unaware of them or experimenting with different ideas. Other platforms tried to improve consistency later on though. For example: there was CUA for IBM. Of course, most of that went out the windows in the late 1990's and early 2000's when companies figured out that the easiest way to differentiate their products to consumers was visually, rather than technically.

by II2II

5/31/2026 at 12:50:05 AM

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.

by musicale

5/31/2026 at 1:13:00 AM

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.

by II2II

5/31/2026 at 1:27:27 AM

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.

by musicale

5/31/2026 at 7:13:10 PM

In addition to Xenix, there was apparently also a System V port for the Lisa.

by musicale

5/31/2026 at 2:32:41 AM

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.

by leoc

5/31/2026 at 5:37:35 AM

Or fully embracing the Pascal programming model.

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++.

by pjmlp

5/31/2026 at 7:17:21 PM

Well they did exactly that - rewriting the Finder in C++, etc.

But it's unfortunate that losing Pascal/Object Pascal also meant losing bounded strings and array bounds checking, even if people turned the latter off in the 1980s because they thought that the performance cost wasn't worth the reliability improvement. That was probably the wrong trade-off then (at least for most regular application code) and even more so today (especially for the vast amount of legacy C code.)

by musicale

5/31/2026 at 12:34:46 PM

Yes, but that could be problematic given the memory constraints of that time:

https://www.folklore.org/Puzzle.html

To this day, one of my favourite word processors is WriteNow, which was ~100,000 lines of assembly.

by WillAdams

5/31/2026 at 1:20:50 PM

Why is writing inline Assembly considered an advantage of C, a language extension even not part of ISO, and always used to point out issues when other languages make use of it?

Naturally there had to be a balance, until mid-90s what we consider AAA games, were mostly Assembly.

by pjmlp

5/31/2026 at 1:41:51 PM

I didn't mention C.

The observation was that linking in the Pascal library was problematic when one was storing everything on a single 400KB Micro Floppy.

by WillAdams

5/31/2026 at 1:59:28 PM

It was implied from my previous post, the story regarding size and the reference to Assembly.

Sorry if misunderstood.

by pjmlp

5/31/2026 at 1:03:06 AM

> certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III.

This seems really extreme. You're saying a trackpad would have made the whole thing a failure?

by asveikau

5/31/2026 at 10:35:41 AM

I'm saying that being designed around the singular task of word processing would have made it a platform/ecosystem failure, even if was a nominally successful one-off product.

The Macintosh (specifically the original 128k version) was a dismal market failure too. What succeeded (relatively speaking) was the platform/ecosystem.

by simondotau

5/31/2026 at 2:57:27 PM

Even the 128k was reasonably successful commercially. Hundreds of thousands of units sold, which was quite good for the time. Inflation-adjusted, it cost quite a bit more than the Vision Pro. They sold the same model with very minor revisions (512, then 512e) into mid-1987.

The 1986 Macintosh Plus was a huge market success and it is only modestly different from the original. Even the SE and Classic didn't change things much.

by rjrjrjrj

5/31/2026 at 12:05:46 AM

Part of this was due to Steve Jobs insisting on no arrow keys on the O.G. Mac's keyboard so as to force usage of the mouse.

by WillAdams

5/31/2026 at 3:31:08 AM

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.

by jnaina

5/31/2026 at 12:15:35 PM

But the part that should not be forgot is Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface. Many of the ideas in the book are only now implementable with the arrival of AI.

Also he defined the difference between computers and humans as computers been precise and accurate and humans as vague, but more flexible. We have now had a paradigm shift in that ai is now the flexible interface that sometimes hallucinates.

by uxhacker

5/30/2026 at 8:29:17 PM

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.

by latexr

5/30/2026 at 9:00:16 PM

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.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

It was nothing like the Macintosh Apple shipped.

by GeekyBear

5/30/2026 at 9:17:57 PM

If you want to get some flavor of what editing on the Canon Cat may have felt like, especially the LEAP keys, try Jasper and/or bitters.

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

by jimbosis

5/30/2026 at 9:38:09 PM

After seeing a video of the Canon Cat in action, I thought “so, this is a lot like Emacs”.

by kickingvegas

5/30/2026 at 10:44:18 PM

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.

by Animats

5/31/2026 at 12:54:47 AM

> 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.

by II2II

5/31/2026 at 11:21:22 AM

> What he didn't get was that computing was not going to stop at word processors.

Huh? We seem to have a completely different read of his work, like the whole ZUI Zoomable Interfaces research? That is not about word processing at all. How to navigate and interact with multi-dimensional data.

by rendx

5/31/2026 at 1:16:06 AM

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.

by bitwize

5/31/2026 at 8:23:03 AM

See another comment that quotes TFA, where what Jef says shows that Canon Cat was not at all "along the lines of his original vision" for the Mackintosh project.

He says that his Mackintosh was also intended to have a graphic display, not a text display, but with a trackball instead of a mouse, therefore it was completely unlike Canon Cat.

by adrian_b

5/30/2026 at 8:50:41 PM

The date in the title should be 2005, not 2013.

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.”

by pavlov

5/31/2026 at 1:06:53 AM

Raskin also died a month later at 26. Februar 2005 (cancer).

by ralfd

5/30/2026 at 10:00:58 PM

In addition to his book, I am constantly linking to "Intuitive Equals Familiar:"

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!)

by a4isms

5/30/2026 at 9:18:57 PM

Visionary, yes.

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.

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 9:26:43 PM

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.

by lysace

5/30/2026 at 7:42:33 PM

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."

by tylerdane

5/30/2026 at 11:52:54 PM

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.

by labrador

5/31/2026 at 8:33:45 AM

Jef wanted a trackball instead of a mouse. The claim that he did not want a pointing device is false.

That would have made little difference for a Mackintosh user. The hardware of a trackball is exactly equivalent with that of a mouse, neither is simpler than the other. (Optical mice without rolling balls have appeared only decades later.)

I have actually used trackballs instead of mice for a few years, and I have greatly preferred them to mice or touchpads.

Trackballs tend to be slower than mice, because you normally move them with the thumb or with the fingers, instead of moving the entire hand, but they are usually more comfortable than mice.

Nowadays, since several years ago, I use as the graphic pointing devices small graphic tablets configured in the relative mode instead of their default absolute mode. These are greatly superior from all points of view, speed, accuracy, comfort, to both mice and trackballs and to any other kinds of pointing devices, like trackpoints or touchpads.

So Jef Raskin had good reasons to question which is the best graphic pointing device, instead of just accepting the mouse because that happened to be the choice made at Xerox.

Based on my experience on how much better a stylus is than any kind of mouse, I consider the use of mice for pointing devices as a great historical mistake in the use of computers. I deeply regret that I have used mice for decades, instead of trying to find something better since the beginning.

The Apple Mackintosh is a significant culprit for the undeserved popularity of mice.

by adrian_b

5/31/2026 at 11:53:30 AM

Is your deliberate misspelling of "Macintosh" spell-check or the same sort of intransigence that compels some people to misspell "Micro$oft" thinking they're clever?

by michaelcampbell

5/31/2026 at 11:55:44 AM

No, sorry, it was just a typo.

The last time when I had an Apple computer was 2 decades ago.

by adrian_b

5/31/2026 at 10:31:57 AM

How is your ‘small tablet’ approach different to a trackpad? Do you use the tablet screen somehow? Sounds interesting!

by taneq

5/31/2026 at 12:17:26 PM

It has no resemblance whatsoever with a trackpad.

I use Wacom Intuos S graphic tablets, on Linux. These are cheap tablets without screens, with a USB or Bluetooth interface.

These tablets have the same size as a traditional mouse pad, so they do not take more size on the desk than a mouse.

The stylus is extremely light, so I can keep it between my fingers while touch typing with all fingers on the keyboard. Thus I can transition between typing and pointing much faster than with a mouse, where I have to grip the mouse or release it.

I configure the tablet in "Relative" mode, where the operating system sees it as a mouse and there is no difference in behavior between it and a mouse.

I configure the stylus to emit a "left click" when I touch the tablet with its tip. The stylus has 2 buttons that can be pressed with your index. I configure one to be "right click" and the other to be "double left click". You can choose any other behaviors.

Holding the stylus is much, much more comfortable than holding a mouse, because of the natural position of the hand.

Moving the cursor with the stylus is much faster than with a mouse. I can move it across the screen from corner to corner instantaneously, because the stylus is much lighter than a mouse, and there is no friction, since it does not touch the tablet, unless you use it to select an area.

The positioning accuracy is much better than with a mouse. If you desire so, you can do handwriting, e.g. signatures, or make drawings with it, which of course is not surprising as this is supposed to be a graphic tablet.

I tried this initially only hoping for a better comfort, because my hand was hurting from the excessive use of mouse all day long. But then I discovered that not only it is very comfortable, but also much faster and more accurate than a mouse can be. Therefore I do not intend to ever use a mouse again.

Trackpads are more comfortable than mice, but they are much slower, so they are not competitive for things like drawing electronics schematics, which I do from time to time. While trackpads, like touchscreens, do not have the inertia problem of a mouse, it is absolutely impossible to move your fingertips with the speed with which you can move the tip of a stylus, which amplifies the amplitude of your finger movements.

There are too few programs which know to use "mouse gestures" for the user interface, e.g. some expensive CAD/EDA programs or the Web browser Vivaldi.

Mouse gestures are already better than any trackpad gestures, but when you use a stylus they become even better, as they are pretty much the same movements as in handwriting.

by adrian_b

5/31/2026 at 12:37:48 PM

Have you tried radial menus?

I found them quite nice in the early days when the popularity of styluses resulted in more experimentation.

by WillAdams

5/31/2026 at 3:08:56 PM

I do not think that any of the programs that I use daily supports radial menus, but the shape of the menus has really no importance, because with the tablet in "Relative" mode and with reasonable values set for the acceleration and sensitivity of the cursor I can reach instantaneously any point on the display, with a very small hand movement, no more than one inch for going from one corner to the diagonally opposite corner of my monitor.

I think that radial menus could have been useful when used with graphic tablets used in their default "Absolute" mode, where the position of the stylus on the tablet corresponds directly to the position of the cursor on the screen, which makes more awkward the cursor movements in locations that are far away from the center of the screen.

No such problems exist when the tablet is in "Relative" mode, when the stylus behaves like a mouse, except that it has neither inertia nor friction and your hand rests in its natural orientation.

Using a graphic tablet in "Absolute" mode is equivalent with using a stylus on a touchscreen, e.g. on a smartphone or tablet, so in those cases using radial menus might also be convenient, unlike in my case, where the shape and position of menus do not matter.

by adrian_b

5/31/2026 at 4:29:00 PM

Like the pop-up main menu in NeXTstep, I found that radial menus afforded a certain amount of "muscle memory" which made usage even more efficient.

by WillAdams

5/30/2026 at 10:49:51 PM

I got to meet Jef Raskin in the early 2000s when he gave a talk in Sweden.

He was a fun person to chat with, lots of great ideas and the drive to work out the details.

by shae

5/31/2026 at 5:24:50 AM

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.

by IOT_Apprentice

5/30/2026 at 8:53:45 PM