2004 is indeed the 20th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh computer, but the history of this computer is actually a little older than this. Joining Berkeley Groks is Jef Raskin (JR) who started the Apple Macintosh project. Frank Ling talks to him about how the project got started, his perspectives on current operating systems, and his current work.
The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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“The Panther keeps on biting me, crashes once or twice a week. The whole system crashes, individual programs crash pretty often still, but the interface is so complex, there’s so many parts to it that I have to go to other people and ask them how do you do this. Sometimes people come to me. Nobody can understand the whole thing.”
This guy must have a seriously tweaked system or one with a bunch of hacks installed. I must say in my 1+ year of using Jaguar then Panther, I have never had the entire system crash on me. I have had some individual apps crash a couple of times, but not more than 5 in the whole year I’ve been a Mac user. And this is on two machines – a 700 megahertz ibook and a 1 gigahertz iMac. I don’t know what is going with this guy’s system. Just the other night I had iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and Safari open and I was doing three major things at once: I was encoding a movie and burning it onto a DVD, I was listing to my iTunes library, and I was surfing with Safari. I did this for about 30 minutes without a single problem. And this is on a 1 gigahertz iMac with 768 RAM.
I average about 1 app crash per day
And never the same app. Sometimes it finder, sometimes Safari and sometimes it Sys Pref.
Since 10.2 came out I only had two crashes. One with 10.2 (VPC & USB) and one with 10.3 (don’t know why).
it would have been nice if he had thought of labeling the mouse buttons, think about the restrictions it would put on developers.
and I like his ideas on a google like search system for the OS. forget metadata, just use what is in the file as the meta data and then WinFS and other such database systems become much better.
I have exactly one system crash since July 2002.
Raskin can find fault in anything *he* didn’t design himself. His idea of the perfect, most intuitive user interface is one he designed. I cannot say he is wrong since he is entitled to his opinion. But is it the best user interface for the majority of computer users? I don’t think so. This guy has a serious ego problem.
he might be reffering to the beach ball of death as a crash….
I considder anything that locks the system up as a crash.
I cannot let my hard drive go to sleep because the system freazes up (7200 RPM Baracuda 4)
and I agree withhim, at this point, there is no fundamental user interface diffrence between the mac and the PC, both are equaly complicated, but one does certain things better than the other and vice verce.
Well I too had problems with Panther just locking up for no reason and having to hard reboot.
Firstly, I realized that it only seemed to lock when I was doing a lot of disk access. I noticed that with LimeWire running I was a lot more prone to lockups.
Java crashes on my DAILY. That being while running Eclipse and or JEdit.
Panther is not perfect.
I have seen a few interviews with Raskin. While his ideas are incredible, the realities of UI is just not there. And he frowns on almost everything he has not had his hands on.
I am running MacOS X and recently upgraded from 512MB to 1024MB RAM (along with a hard disk upgrade from the standard 60GIG to WesternDigital 160GIG).
If you are runnning into problems, run the Apple Hardware Testing software, and conduct the full test (normally takes quite a few minutes). The fact is, if you have crap memory, you’ll have crap reliability and the number of times I’ve turned crashing PC’s/Mac’s into rock solid computers simply by replacing the memory modules is too many to remember.
As for people whining about applications crashing, that isn’t an operating system problem in the purist sense. That is an issue for the software producer and like before, everytime I do hear these people complain, the first line of enquiry is, “oh, why haven’t you installed the update?”, software doesn’t update itself, you have to.
lol. not quite. Macintosh is the computer. Mac OS is the system that does it. In my experience Mac os 9 and below had major crash problems. OS X fixed a lot of those problems or at least made it easier to recover from them without having to reboot. Of course I use Mandrake Linux on my mac and it crashs sometimes as well, usually due to not having enough resources for everything which is generally what happens. People either dont meet the min requiremnets, push their computers too far or just manage them poorly; the other time is problematic software/hardware
Andy Hertzfeld has a broad and deep web site about the history of the Mac here: http://folklore.org/
“Raskin can find fault in anything *he* didn’t design himself. His idea of the perfect, most intuitive user interface is one he designed. I cannot say he is wrong since he is entitled to his opinion. But is it the best user interface for the majority of computer users? I don’t think so. This guy has a serious ego problem. ”
Well he did say he’s creating a cross-platform UI, so I guess the proof is in the pudding. And aren’t most “super geniuses” like that?
I wouldput more stock in a UI designer than you.
he is right that human interface design is about ergonomics…cognitive ergonomics.
humans have certain aspects of thinking that are the same accross the board, and a UI should be taylored to fit those aspects. Windows and OS X while good, require the user to learn a lot about the system in order to be efficent and profficent.
This is not an interview, but a commercial spot for the book of Jef Raskin. Age and ego make bad minds, nothing more. 🙂 I’m sorry about Raskin.
Anyway, STEVE JOBS is the ONLY and REAL Macintosh creator, NOT Jef Raskin and he left Apple BEFORE Mac was out. Tell the truth, plz. 😀
I’ve run OS X since Dec 2001 and with a handful of exceptions the freezes or crashes I’ve had can all be traced back to hardware failures (1 logic board, 2 Maxtor HDs.)
OS X, is much more stable and responsive than the Win XP box I have at work — then again at work they went with cheap ass “goatway” comptuers.
your poor diluted soul.
Well right, it’s not Apple’s fault when an app crashes unless it crashes because they changed stuff around in JAVA! In Jaguar there were no stability problems with Jedit and Eclipse for me but when Panther came out, JEdit wouldn’t work because of the changes they mande to JAVA in OS X. No one really knows though what exactly they did that is causing the problems and newer versions (the betas of the upcoming release) seem to work but do have crashing problems that might be related to it being beta software.
I will take issue though when OS X locks completely as a result of an application. I never had Linux lock up completely because of an application, I was always able to still use my computer and I could just go and do xkill on the app, but I have had several complete lockups while running panther and no app should ever bring down the entire system like that.
As far as hardware, well it’s ALL apple hardware so if it’s crashing because of that, I can indeed blame apple for it can’t I?
I did have problems with Jaguar. Panther fixes most of the bugs and since I upgraded I don’t have any problems. I think the guy might have a hardware problem.
S.
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http://www.sideliners.ca
Jef’s ego once again tries to rewrite Apple history:
“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 called “leap 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. ”
from http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_Fa…
someone has a problem with their comment systems!
Yep. I was going to report abuse on all but one of them, but damn will that take a while!
When I received my first Mac with OS X it would crash 3 or 4 times daily (kernel panics, etc.). Finally I took the advice of an Apple Tech Support person and got the processor replaced. Since then I have undergone several upgrades to OS X 10.3 and my computer does not crash or lock up. Occasionally some applications will lock up but one can simply “kill” them.
Some might say that I do not give my OS enough of a workout. Well, I run MS Office, InDesign, Photoshop, iLife (including burning DVDs), Safari, Mail, dual processor SETI program (continuously) and numerous other applications and even some games. I have an ethernet laser printer and a USB color printer as well as a 200 GB firewire external drive, a SCSI scanner, an ADVC1000 analog to digital converter (firewire), and a 35 mm slide scanner (SCSI).
My experience with users having problems with Panther or Jaguar is usually related to hardware or running some of the older programs in Classic mode. An Apple Tech suggested that one should always start up Classic before doubling clicking an OS 9 application or file. That works to reduce crashes of applications in Classic mode.
It’s very weird (narrow minded perhaps) that just because a user is running OSX without problem does not mean other user is experiencing the same thing. The fact is JR does indeed have such a problem. Instead of sweeping it under the rug, Apple should continue to improve on the OS
I agree that OSX and WIN XP are both very complex. The idea here is to design a UI that’s very simple to use YET allows the user to tap the full functionalities of the OS (no easy task if u ask me!)
A thought does cross my mind. What if u could get the stability and UNIX underpining of OSX but with the UI and speed of OS 9? I suspect a lot of users will jump in to use it
I dont’t understand while people keep on discussing about UI glitches while out there there’s already a plenty of nice GUI experiments by using creatively Flash.
“The network is the computer” !
which graphic card is better the one on 12″ ibook or the powerbook.. coz d one in 12″ powerbook looks rather old.
“It’s very weird (narrow minded perhaps) that just because a user is running OSX without problem does not mean other user is experiencing the same thing. The fact is JR does indeed have such a problem.”
I agree completely. Obviously JR’s not “anti-Apple” since he still uses an OS X box. And he also uses Dells so he’s also not necessarily “anti-Windows.” We have all had our share of craptastic machines and our blessed machines. The big difference is that when Dell gives a bad user experience, they lose a customer. When Apple gives a bad user experience, the user blames it on the OS Version, applications, the CPU version, the specific tech-support guy, etc.
Regardless of what causes the problem, the problem reflects poorly on the machine and gives the user a bad impression.
Raskin is ok. He’s trying to make a ZUI, which isn’t going at much of a pace.
Here’s my prediction: We’ll get a ZUI as a byproduct of the vector desktop, and we’ll get a vector desktop through SVG icons/text/window managers — not Berlin.
Panther used to crash continously on my Powerbook 12 rev B. Apps and system lock. Hardware test showed everything as working fine.
However, I decided to take out the xtra memory I purchased and since then it worked like a charm. Don’t think it has crashed since. ( Every now and again an app crashes, not enough to be a bother though usuall MS apps
Anyways I replaced the memory and havent had problems since. I gather from mac forums this problem is not uncommon.
( on a side note: a couple of months ago I ran Mac OS 1.0 using an emulator, I think it was vMac. Any person interested in OS’s should give it a go)
“and I like his ideas on a google like search system for the OS. forget metadata, just use what is in the file as the meta data and then WinFS and other such database systems become much better.”
That only works for text files. How about images, audio files and archives of binary files?
The files I most often lose are downloads of non-text files with inadequate file names. PDFs with names like “thesis.pdf” are common.
I think most of the problems of finding lost files from a few months ago would go away if the user took more care when naming the file.
Searches for particular strings in text files are indeed useful – this facility has been available in most OSes for years. For example, I can open a Shell window and type “search programs: ostrich” and get a list of all the files on that partition which contain the word “ostrich”.
“The Panther keeps on biting me, crashes once or twice a week. The whole system crashes, individual programs crash pretty often still, but the interface is so complex, there’s so many parts to it that I have to go to other people and ask them how do you do this. Sometimes people come to me. Nobody can understand the whole thing.”
This guy’s full of it……
I use Panther on a system I built out of old Mac and PC parts. It has a Beige motherboard and case, an IBM G4 500mhz cpu upgrade, a hacked PC radeon board, a PC hard disk, 512MB PC133 SDRAM from a PC,and a Dell monitor. I had to use Xpostfacto to install Panther so it is hacked, I also got OS 9.22 and Yellow Dog Linux. So this Machine is nonstandard. A truly hacked system from ground up.Cost me less than $200. It never crashes on Panther not in the 4 months I have had it. OS9 has locked a few times, but Panther has a Linux like stability. As far as Mr. Raskin’s take on user interfaces, I think he is a true visionary. Before passing judgement download his software and read the manual. It is true that the interface paradigm needs to shift. Personally, I think interfaces need to move to 3D to do this. Check out Project Looking Glass…Google it.
I agree with what people have said about OSX being really stable. I’ve been running it for a couple years with only rare crashes. I don’t think I’ve had Panther crash (as in system crash) even once since installing it, and I got it the day it was released.
And when I’ve had apps crash, which aren’t too common, it has been some wierd crappy app that I downloaded, or else I’m doing something weird like trying to import a corrupt .aac file into iTunes. Maybe his problem is he’s using OSX to develop THE, and he’s integrating it into the system, and his programming is so bad that it’s screwing things up.
I’m suspicious of anyone who wants a computer interfact to be as easy as he wants it to be. He’s talking about how the mouse buttons, those two little mouse buttons, need to be LABELLED! Look, maybe back in 1984 when people had trouble with the concept of the mouse, that might have been worth something, but at this point, it’d be fine with my to not be treated like a complete retard. If you can’t figure out the mouse, there are bigger fish to fry.
I’ve used Panther for 1 month before that I used Jaguar for three.
My mac never crashes and neither do apps. So I don’t know what he’s smoking or doing wrong. The he rags about resetting nvram which msot people will never do. Remember the programmers switch on early Macs? Not exaclty intuitive Jef.
This is jsut nuts. I switch betwen both all day long. The Mac gets out of my way and lets me get things done. The PC is always in my face.
Raskin thinks he’s god and anything he did create or have a hand in is crap…he’s so 70s and out of it, history.
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Here’s a great series of articles about the Mac history by the creators and Raskin doesn’t necessarily come off well…
http://www.folklore.org/index.py
It’s so boring of you folks to go crazy with all the “he’s full of it” comments in regards to the OSX crashes Raskin commented on. It’s bloody obvious that some people have crashing problems and some people do not. The cause is NOT the user, either way. Now that I’ve vented that comment…
I bought Raskin’s book. I think it’s a great research book, frankly, which is what I use it for.
I find that Jef Raskin has a great amount of knowledge about these topics and is really spot-on with a lot of the things he talks about. I just don’t agree with everything. Specifically, I don’t agree with his “Humane Interface” environment. I think that keyboard meta keys are not the answer. I think that pointing devices (and moreso, direct manipulation via touch screens) are far more simplistic and easy to “get” in a short amount of time for most humans. Interacting with visuals is the most basic common human function (with obvious exceptions of visually disabled people, but they too use direct manipulation with their hands).
I also find it rather shameful that he seems to be missing some important details on what the state of current OS UI systems is. He commented that you have a file name limit of 31 characters and this has not been true on the Mac since HFS+ (and the 8 character limit has been gone on the PC since even earlier). The current limit, if I recall correctly, is 255 characters.
This and one or two other telling comments left me feeling as though he has not kept up to date with the UI designs he is “against.”
File names, by the way, while not being ideal, are really quite a helpful thing. Aside from the obvious, the file name provides the user a mental “title” to documents or objects created. The same as the titles we give our file folders in our drawers and the names on the CDs and songs on the CDs found on our shelves. In fact, what exactly is the difference between a title and a file name? I see none.
File names and the files and folders systems we use are not going to solve the disorder of a disorderly person. Then again, no system will solve such behavioral problems. You cannot fix a human behavioral problem by providing a better tool (under reasonable amounts of variation, of course; one system can be better than another, but it is up to the human to make full use of it).
As for the comments about Raskin having ego issues… yeah, I can see that. So what? Either the information he spews is useful to you or it isn’t. If he has an ego, does that suddenly disqualify anything he’s said that is 100% correct? No.
Lighten up folks. Talk about the real issues. Not the obvious geek candy such as OS religion and “it’s your fault your system crashes” I-am-better-than-you-isms.
“Raskin thinks he’s god and anything he did create or have a hand in is crap…he’s so 70s and out of it, history.”
He does have some interesting ideas and his book is worth reading. His big limitation IMO is that he thinks the main thing people do on computers is edit text files.
This is strange from somebody who in the early days realised that you might also want to compose music.
None of these UI gurus have begun to tackle the real problem, which is how to make a good GUI for a big and unavoidably complex program such as Cubase or Lightwave.
Don, that is true, but image files, and music files can have default descriptions set to them at the time of creation that will allow for google like searches.
To search through all kind of files, why not make a plugin architecture? Why not extend OLE or so with a how-good-do-these-files-match possibility, so that you can compose part of a melody or sketch a picture you want to find?
“None of these UI gurus have begun to tackle the real problem, which is how to make a good GUI for a big and unavoidably complex program such as Cubase or Lightwave.”
Maybe because there’s only so much you can fit into the shoebox. What do I mean by that? Simply that there’s only so much you can do to tame complexity while staying within a particular paradigm. And “taming” is as much art as it is science. Now as for Cubase or Lightwave’s interface. Keep in mind the intended audiance. These individuals have complex jobs, and their tools reflect that. If the interface isn’t perfect? That could be as much corporate “politics” as UI experts not knowing what to do. At least with OSS the barriers are lower as far as audience participation.
I think OSX is pretty stable, but I have obviously had worse luck than others here. I run 10.2 on a Beige G3 with 512 meg of ram. I have felt it appropriate to reboot 5 or 6 times after an application crash left the system running less well than normal. I have had 3 or 4 system crashes that required a power off. At least one of those required me to physically unplug the unit because nothing else worked. The only non-Apple software I run regularly is Mozilla. Two of the system crashes happend while running iTunes. It is a pretty good system and I like it enough to keep it, but it is not as stable as my Dell GX1/1.4GHz/Mandrake 9.1 system.
I’ve been running my iMac G4/800 with 10.2 and 10.3 since each was released and can probably count the system crashes on one hand. I never turn it off and I run to its limits with iMovie, iDVD, and much more. I would hate OS X if it performed like his. Let’s face it — to do complex things (make movies, create websites, music) you need complex machines. Right now the Mac makes it the easiest. Could Apple do better? Yes! There still needs to be a way, some computer assisted mode, where someone with *zero* computer experience can sit down and learn how to surf the web, write e-mail, or do other basic tasks. There is no way to do that now without reading a book, taking a class, or having someone hold your hand. One of these days, I’ll write that front-end and open up Macs to a whole new audience.
From what I read Jef wasn’t saying that file names suck. He was saying that our use of them sucks. As to Jace’s comment about song names – sure song names and album names make it easy for us to find things. But have you ever written a song, or named an album? There is a tremendous amount of thought and effort put into naming these songs and albums.
A song name is generally what the entire song is wrapped about. So you are given a lot of information to help you relate to that song name. Jef said that our problem is that we spend a few seconds naming a file and then move on to something interesting. Well think about that a bit. We just might start to clue into what information he was giving us.
To all you LOSERS that go on and on and on about how your machine never crashes. So what? Computers crash, all OSes suck. They are all still way too difficult, and get in the way of what you want to get done. You are letting your big fat stuck high in the air noses get in the way of some good information. Wake up stupid. You totally remind me of the mindless MSDOS users that we had to deal with when the Lisa and and the Macintosh came out. In fact you are probable those same people!
What Jef stated about mice being the number one cause of injury to people with computer related injuries is true. Wait until you have 20 years on the mouse and your hands become next to useless. You’ll begin to understand what Jef is talking about – except it will be too late for you because you were spending all your time stating how wonderful your machine is.
Look I haven’t read Jef’s book, and I don’t know what his meta keys are, but I’m open to reading about them. I’ve had Macintoshes since the 128 and I use a Mac just about everyday. But that doesn’t blind me into believing that my machine isn’t in need of being reinvented.
OS X has made some great achievements and I like it considerably more then the previous Mac OSes. But dude 20 plus years have gone by and it’s still basically the same UI design that is on my Macintosh 128. This states volumes of what a great job the the Macintosh and Lisa teams did back then, but this is no reason not to be open to and look for new solutions.
I would like to make some remarks about my 23 years of computing, I feel that the experience you get from the one vendor all formula always gave me the best usability and stability. All computers crash once in a while but working with lets say SUN/IBM or APPLE I have the most stable environment compared to many others.
Hardware fails very very often and some of the posters make a good point there. Working with Panter gives me the feeling I’ve been waiting for those 23 years. It is far from perfect but isn’t it nice that we always can look forward to improvements, maybe that is what this Jef guy is all about. I think that is exactly what keeps me in this industry.
One of the best GUI improvements I have seen in a long time is EXPOSE assigned to the hotconrners. The mouse is for me only an aid for the things I really cannot do with the keyboard shortcuts. Being proud about YOUR OS is cool and that makes us luckily different.
Enjoy it!