Steve Jobs is not attending the Macworld event in Boston this week, though a panel moderator laid a black turtleneck and jeans on an empty seat in his honor. Early Apple engineers took advantage of the absence of Steve’s reality distortion field™ and discussed Apple’s early days and setting the record straight about the origins of the mac.
I think the black turtle neck and jeans carry the auroa of Jobs’ reality distortion field even if he isn’t there.
I’m so tired of Raskin. It’s like he didn’t evolve out of the 80s with the rest of the world.
I would of loved to of used a mac in the earily days. My school was so cheap they bought commidor64’s. I hated computers for years until Win95 came out and finally now I’m on a mac(well a couple of pc’s too).
He gets thrown out of the Lisa group so he goes storming over to the Macintosh group to claim credit. I wonder what Jobs did over there. He’s never programmed and he can’t do hardware. I guess he picked the color of the boxes and gave a nod of approval to pretty screens. Yep, he invented the Macintosh.
Actually he showed off what the Macintosh could do and kept it from getting canned on more than one occasion, before and after its release.
I agree, it seems nothing now is good enough for him only stuff that he personally worked on in the past.
Just my two cents.
really, I mean his ideas are kinda weird. he calls OS X gross, but it is only because its interface is not his design. Raskin is of the group that wants to sacrifice all power to the user in order to make an insanely simple interface that is both boring and annoying to work with (if you used Classic Mac OS you will get where I am coming from even if you disagree).
While there are certain aspects of OS X that I find not perfect, the fact that the Apple menu is not a place to dump everything in a huge, monolithic list anymore is the single greatest thing about OS X. Raskin loves flat systems, I find that they are tedious to work with. OS X and Windows XP are much better than their former selves, but Longhorn will be hopefully much more in line with the new way of doing things (XP is not so different than the Classic windows interface as to make it more pleasing to deal with, yet)
What about Woz?
I found the article to be of very little substance.
there should be a “be” in the last sentence in the fragment that talks about longhorn.
I think that in addition to the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field ™ we also need to refer to the Jeff Raskin Ego ™. God that man is annoying.
I really liked this comment though:
When asked about Apple’s decision to not license the Mac OS and if that decision could have led Apple to a larger market share, Andy Hertzfeld commented that, “they would have had a chance, but it wouldn’t be Apple anymore. Who knows what would have happened.”
I agree. He’s quoted in this article as saying, “The Mac has gone from insanely great to insanely gross.”
I’m sorry all you old-school Mac fanatics out there, but Mac OS began innovative, and then lagged for about 15 years, while the rest of the computing world moved on. It wasn’t until Jobs took over again and started pushing for innovative designs and a new MacOS that Apple began to recapture some of it’s former glory.
The newest Macs and latest versions of OSX is as good as its ever been, and still getting better. And I think it’s largely because of the good ol’ “distortion field”. Jobs seems to get people motivated and make things happen.
History is written by winners.
I thought it was written by the Victors. If only my mom had thought to name me Victor, I could have a plush job writing history books right now…
“I’m sorry all you old-school Mac fanatics out there, but Mac OS began innovative, and then lagged for about 15 years, while the rest of the computing world moved on. It wasn’t until Jobs took over again and started pushing for innovative designs and a new MacOS that Apple began to recapture some of it’s former glory.”
Great point. Jobs was never a creator of sorts, but he’s the kind of person that knows talent and knows a good product when he sees it. Look at how many great ideas and products completely flopped because no one saw their real potential.
It’s amazing that there’s still this much enmity between Raskin and Jobs after all these years. The Macintosh “project” was, no doubt, stolen from Raskin by Jobs. Everyone knows Jobs could be a petulant little twit in the early years – though one with excellent taste in design.
The core Macintosh “experience” however, is often at odds (IMHO) with Raskin’s UI philosophy. The Canon Cat, which Raskin designed, didn’t use a WIMP interface at all. There’s nothing wrong with that – it was a very efficient text processor and many of Raskin’s UI ideas are neat. Nonetheless, the heart and soul of the Mac, is the incredible graphical UI. This is the descendant of ideas born at Xerox PARC, not the fruit of Raskin’s mind. To keep trumpteting that he’s the “father of the Mac” diminishes the extraordinary work of Burrell Smith, Bill Atkinson, et al.
Raskin worked for Xerox and helped create the PARC design. he came to Apple from there to work on the Mac.
Anyone have a video of this panel discussion?
Jobs is what is called a leader. he has a vision of what he wants and hires people with the skills to get to that vision. if those people have a different philosophy that is to bad, the leader’s job is to achieve his or her vision.
yeah, it would be nice to go right to the source rather than be left with 3 quotes from a panel discussion that happened to help promote the ideas that the author of the article seems to hold.
It’s pretty clear that even though the Mac may have started as a Raskin project, it would have utterly failed if Jobs hadn’t taken him over and drove him away.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_Father…
As recalled by Andy Hertzfeld:
“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.”
good point. Raskin actually gets too much credit. and his “leap keys” idea is monumentally foolish. thank god Jobs took over.
I like the leap keys idea, just not as the main way to navigate. More like an option for when you are too lazy to grab the mouse.
yeah, they are called hot keys and are used for things that are used a lot, but Raskin was talking about everything being leap key linked….like Word Perfect 1.0 style. the system might have been nice and easy to use when you understood all the navigation, but the learning curve would be way to steep.
If Steve had his way the Macintosh would have been named “Bicycle” or something.
“If Steve had his way the Macintosh would have been named “Bicycle” or something.”
Wrong!
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Bicycle.tx…
Andy Hertzfeld recalls:
A month or so after Jef [Raskin]’s departure, Rod Holt announced to the small design team that the new code name for the project was “Bicycle”, and that we should change all references to “Macintosh” to “Bicycle”. When we objected, thinking “Bicycle” was a silly name, Rod thought that it shouldn’t matter, “since it was only a code name”
Rod’s edict was never obeyed. Somehow, Macintosh just seemed right. It was already ingrained with the team, and the “Bicycle” name seemed forced and inappropriate, so no one but Rod ever called it “Bicycle”.
….
After hearing all the suggestions, Steve and the marketing team decided to go with Lisa and Macintosh as the official names.
He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys called “leap keys” to do the pointing.
Judging from his The Humane Environment project I get the impression that he still doesn’t like the mouse.
It is mildly amusing that someone who is a self-proclaimed guru of GUI actually doesn’t seem to like graphical interfaces.
“yeah, they are called hot keys and are used for things that are used a lot, but Raskin was talking about everything being leap key linked….like Word Perfect 1.0 style. the system might have been nice and easy to use when you understood all the navigation, but the learning curve would be way to steep.”
I know, I use hot keys all the time. I was actually refering to the leap key idea as a secondary way to navigate. Related but different, sorry for the confusion.
He gets thrown out of the Lisa group so he goes storming over to the Macintosh group to claim credit. I wonder what Jobs did over there. He’s never programmed and he can’t do hardware. I guess he picked the color of the boxes and gave a nod of approval to pretty screens. Yep, he invented the Macintosh.
You don’t know the history very well at all. Yes it is true that Steve can be a brash, arrogant, petulant person at times (perhaps even today). But Steve Jobs deserves far more credit for the Macintosh that was released than Jef Raskin. No Steve did not program or design hardware. He was the manager and, so-called, visionary of the project. Reading the history on this, from people that were actually there would leave you with the conclusion that, though some may have disliked or disagreed with Steve (and even hate him), he was a driving force behind what the Mac did become.
I have to say that Steve is one hell of a marketer, and he never really claimed to be anything different. Marketing is one half knowing what the customer wants, and one half figuring out how to get them what they want… (Actually, I’m a marketing major and know there is a good deal more to it then that… but whatever). He saw potential in Xerox’s GUI, and pushed his developers, software and hardware, to make it a real consumer product. I have heard accounts of Steve standing over tech guys trying to make them understand why it was so important for the Mac to boot quickly. I remember the first thing I looked at when I got my parents to let me pick out my first PC. I didn’t know much back then, but it made since to me that a good computer should boot fast. So I bought the one that turned off and back on the quickest. Jobs knew that’s how people thought and how to use it to sell computers. He was an industry business visionary, more then a industry technology visionary… still is really.
I mean think about macs today. I know a few people that run apple and they all have a ton of apple crap to go with it. Jobs knew that Computers were becoming the center of much of our entertainment and media, so Jobs decreed the developed a Digital Convergence package centered around the mac. So today we have the apple store selling iPods and cameras and whatnot that just works with apple computers. Some of it, you can get from other places, but if you buy something from the apple store you know it will work with your Mac with no fuss, and people like that. That’s exactly what many of us are looking for these days, and look where Jobs positioned the company, right in the middle of this big, otherwise neglected, niche. So he didn’t develop the hardware, he was still pretty instrumental in getting it to market. BTW I have never owned a mac.
Its really late here I hope that all makes since.
By the way, to those of you who knock Jobs for stealing the GUI idea from Xerox I’ll leave you with my favorite John Lenon quote. “Good bands borrow, Great bands steal”
“I’ll leave you with my favorite John Lenon quote. “Good bands borrow, Great bands steal””
Did that turn out to be Picasso or Van Gogh?
I can’t see that Leap Keys are of any use unless all you do is text editing. How do they help in video editing or MIDI sequencing or web design ?
“I can’t see that Leap Keys are of any use unless all you do is text editing. How do they help in video editing or MIDI sequencing or web design ?”
No one way works for doing everything. That’s why there is no universal file format.
Raskin’ IS god. (In guitar lingo).
Among other great things that are his brain-children. He HAS admitted that the “one-button” was a bad idea and that windows got it right on that one.
As a Mac user (w/ a two-button scroll-click mouse) this is something that jobs won’t let go of even today. May we should say…
“That Jobs is living in the 80s.”
🙂