Jef Raskin (born Jeff Raskin; March 9, 1943 – February 26, 2005) was an American human–computer interface expert who conceived and began leading the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s.
Jef Raskin was born in New York City to a secular Jewish family, whose surname is a matronymic from "Raske", Yiddish nickname for Rachel. He received a BA in mathematics and a BS in physics with minors in philosophy and music from Stony Brook University. In 1967, he received a master's degree in computer science from Pennsylvania State University, after having switched from mathematical logic due to differences of opinion with his advisor. Even though he had completed work typical for a PhD, the university was not accredited for a PhD in computer science. The first original computer application he wrote was a music application as part of his master's thesis.
Raskin later enrolled in a graduate music program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), but quit to teach art, photography, and computer science there. He worked as an assistant professor in the Visual Arts department from 1968 until 1974. There, he presented shows about toys as works of art. Raskin announced his resignation from the assistant professorship by flying over the Chancellor's house in a hot air balloon. He was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to establish a Computer and Humanities center, which used several 16-bit Data General Nova computers and CRTs, rather than the more common Teletype teleprinters.
Along with his undergraduate student Jonathan (Jon) Collins, Raskin developed the FLOW programming language for use in teaching programming to the art and humanities students. The language was first used at the Humanities Summer Training Institute held in 1970 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. The language has only seven statements (COMMENT, GET IT, PRINT IT, PRINT "text", JUMP TO, IF IT IS " " JUMP TO, and STOP) and can not manipulate numbers. The language was first implemented in Fortran by Collins in under a week. Later versions of the language utilized "typing amplification" in which only the first letter is typed and the computer provides the balance of the instruction eliminating typing errors. It was also the basis for programming classes taught by Raskin and Collins in the UCSD Visual Arts Department.
Raskin curated several art shows including one featuring his collection of unusual toys, and presenting toys as works of art. During this period, he changed the spelling of his name from "Jeff" to "Jef" after having met Jon Collins and liking the lack of extraneous letters.
Raskin occasionally wrote for computer publications, such as Dr. Dobb's Journal. He formed a company named Bannister and Crun, which was named for two characters playing in the BBC radio comedy The Goon Show.
Raskin first met Apple Computer co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage workshop following the debut of their Apple II personal computer at the first West Coast Computer Faire. Jobs hired Raskin's company Bannister and Crun to write the Apple II BASIC Programming Manual. Raskin said "I was talking fifty dollars a page. They talked fifty dollars for the whole manual." Upon the Apple II unit with the serial number of "2", he reportedly wrote "a literate manual that became a standard for the young industry".
In January 1978, Raskin joined Apple as Manager of Publications, the company's 31st employee. For some time he continued as Director of Publications and New Product Review, and also worked on packaging and other issues. He had concealed his degree in computer science, out of concern for cultural bias against academia among the hobby-driven personal computer industry. He explained, "If they had known ... they might not have let me in the company, because there was such an antiacademic bias in the early Apple days."
From his responsibility for documentation and testing, Raskin had great influence on early engineering projects. Because the Apple II only displayed uppercase characters on a 40-column screen, his department used the PolyMorphic Systems 8813 (an Intel-8080-based machine running a proprietary operating system called Exec) to write documentation; this spurred the development of an 80-column display card and a suitable text editor for the Apple II. His experiences testing Applesoft BASIC inspired him to design a competing product, called Notzo BASIC, which was never implemented. When Wozniak developed the first disk drives for the Apple II, Raskin went back to his contacts at UCSD and encouraged them to port the UCSD P-System operating system, which incorporated a version of the Pascal programming language. Apple later licensed and shipped it as Apple Pascal.
Through this time, Raskin continually wrote memos about how the personal computer could become a true consumer appliance. While the Apple III was under development in 1978 and '79, Raskin was lobbying for Apple to create a radically different kind of computer that was designed from the start to be easy to use. In Computers by the Millions, he stated that expandable computers like the Apple II were too complex, and development was difficult due to the unknown nature of the machine the program ran on. The machine he envisioned was very different from the Macintosh that was eventually released and had much more in common with PDAs than modern desktop-based machines.
Raskin started the Macintosh project in 1979 to implement some of these ideas. He later hired his former student Bill Atkinson from UCSD to Apple, along with Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith from the Apple Service Department, which was located in the same building as the Publications Department. Secretly bypassing Jobs's ego and authority by continually securing permission and funding directly at the executive level, Raskin created and solely supervised the Macintosh project for approximately its first year. This included selecting the name of his favorite apple, writing the mission document The Book of Macintosh, securing office space, and recruiting and managing the original staff. Author Steven Levy said, "It was Raskin who provided the powerful vision of a computer whose legacy would be low cost, high utility, and a groundbreaking friendliness."
Raskin's own recollections about the creation of the Macintosh and his work as a software designer are described in the book Programmers at Work, a collection of interviews published by Microsoft Press in 1986.
The Macintosh prototype was similar in power to the Apple II and included a small 9-inch (230 mm) black-and-white character display and floppy drive, in a small case. It was text only, as Raskin disliked the computer mouse or anything else that could take his hands from the keyboard. Several basic applications were built into the machine, selectable by pressing function keys. The machine included logic to understand user intentions and switch programs dynamically. For instance, if the user simply started typing text it switched into editor mode, and if numbers are typed it switched to calculator mode. In many cases these switches were largely invisible to the user.
In 1981, after the Lisa team had "kicked him out", Steve Jobs's attention drew toward Raskin's Macintosh project, intending to combine the Xerox PARC-inspired GUI-based Lisa design to Raskin's appliance-computing, "computers-by-the-millions" concept. Steve Wozniak, who around then had been co-leading the Macintosh team with Raskin, was on hiatus from the company following a traumatic airplane accident, allowing Jobs to take managerial lead over the project.
Raskin is credited as one of the first to introduce Jobs and the Lisa engineers to the PARC concepts, though he ultimately dismissed PARC's technology and opposed the use of the mouse. Raskin claimed to have had continued direct input into the eventual Mac design, including the decision to use a one-button mouse as part of the Apple interface, instead of PARC's 3-button mouse. Others, including Larry Tesler, acknowledge his advocacy for a one-button mouse but say that it was a decision reached simultaneously by others at Apple who had stronger authority on the issue. Raskin later stated that were he to redesign the mouse, it would have three clearly labeled buttons—two buttons on top marked "Select" and "Activate", and a "Grab" button on the side that could be used by squeezing the mouse. It has the three described buttons (two invisible), but they are assigned to different functions than Raskin specified for his own interface and can be customized.