Rest in peace, Jef. You made the Mac happen, and contributed a lot else that was great in the world.

He never got as much public attention, but I have a feeling that 100 years from now, Jef Raskin will have a bigger chapter in the 'Computer History' book than Steve Jobs.

He will be missed.

What a sad story, Steve Jobs was jealous of Jef Raskin's Mac concepts, forced Jef out, then tried to pretend that he was the Mac creator. Sorry iLemmings but your hero is one of the most disgraceful CEOs in the country. Jobs makes Bill Gates look honorable.

Taking the opportunity to bash Apple at a time like this, just proves that RealityCheck is a hateful scum.

Why, oh why is this buffoon even still allowed in this forum?

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RealityCheck wrote:
What a sad story, Steve Jobs was jealous of Jef Raskin's Mac concepts, forced Jef out, then tried to pretend that he was the Mac creator. Sorry iLemmings but your hero is one of the most disgraceful CEOs in the country. Jobs makes Bill Gates look honorable.

After that comment I recommend you make a tactical retreat or dig in deep.

I did a little more research on Raskin, and found this review on his book at Amazon, and on his approach to the "invisible interface."

"Mr. Raskin recommends that we dispense with GUI fluff that obscures more than it illuminates (not necessarily a bad idea) and replace it with a system in which your content IS the interface. While typing this review, for instance, I could type the word SAVE, select the word SAVE, and invoke a command to interpret the selected word as a command, thus saving the text to disk. Or type EMAIL (right here in the middle of this sentence!), select the command (and somehow also select the sentence), and tap a key to send the sentence off as an email. Or I can type an arithmetic expression into my text and evaluate it on the fly (which as we all know, most users need to do urgently and often). Truly out-there stuff, and I think that's admirable, but I also think it's wrong. Many of the book's proposed computing paradigms are based on the notion that most files are text files, when in reality, at least in today's systems, only a tiny percentage of files contain human-readable text. We've got applications, MP3s, video, pointers to content, content we've made ourselves, content from other sources. These data are different, and cannot all be tossed into a homogeneous soup and treated as text."

I can't see the advantages to a general purpose system in such an interface. How do you "type" and then "invoke" a command like "save" when you're using iMovie? (Answer: Cmd-S" - see, I didn't have to type "save".) It sounds like Raskin was looking to make a better word processor, which is where Mac started (the DTP revolution), but the world has since moved on.

You are just a rude, hateful individual. This sort of thing is low even by your pondscum standards.

I vote for forum ban.

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Intruder wrote:
You are just a rude, hateful individual. This sort of thing is low even by your pondscum standards.

I vote for forum ban.

What? No...after using the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a Tsunami as platform to say bad things about Steve Jobs, I have to say that this is NOT that low by "his standards."

That's not saying much, of course...

The Register has an interesting obit from a gent who knew Raskin personally. It's different from the image I'd gotten recently of a grumpy old goat living in the past. http://www.theregister.com/2005/02/28/jeff_raskin_obituary/

RC is not going away. I already tried a while ago to get a ban on him when he used Jobs' cancer as a platform for his ramblings.

Ignore the ignorant.

How sorry an individual do you have to be to use a (good) man's death to spread your idiotic trolling?


BAN this scumbag.

You are the lowest of the low.

Please don't feed the trolls.

I don't know why anyone reads his posts, anyway. They're automatically hidden from view. You need to click on them to read them. So why click, and why read?

Again, please don't feed the trolls. I don't normally read his posts, and I don't appreciate having to read them in quotes again and again and again as "good" posters insist on replying to them. TMO's comment system is in desperate need of yet another overhaul (threads would make this so much simpler).

Please don't feed the trolls.

Check out this link and read the facts you Steve Jobs acolytes:

http://www.forbes.com/work/entrepreneurs/2005/02/28/cx_ah_0228raskin.html

Steve Jobs called the concept of using a GUI to operate a computer the "dumbest idea he ever heard of."

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RealityCheck wrote:
Check out this link and read the facts you Steve Jobs acolytes:

http://www.forbes.com/work/entrepreneurs/2005/02/28/cx_ah_0228raskin.html

Steve Jobs called the concept of using a GUI to operate a computer the "dumbest idea he ever heard of."

Seriously, who cares? Bill Gates called the Internet a "fad" at first. Look at how incredibly idiotic THAT was.

What matters in the end is that both later changed thei tune... Jobs on GUIs, Gates on the Internet. Neither were visionaries, which isn't shocking.

Its just kinda sad that you take the opportunity of the death of a great man (Raskin) to try to bash Jobs. Kind of sad and pathetic, aren't you?

All I see right now are iPods, a little tribute would be commendable and respectful of them, rift or no rift with Steve Jobs.

I wanted to learn more about Jef Raskin, so I did some exploration last night, and came across an interview by Ubiquity, from which I include the following excerpt...

UBIQUITY: Have you written a book on your experiences there [at Apple}?

RASKIN: Well, it hasn’t seen the light of day, and won't until I finish the more technical books I am currently writing. It’s called “The Mac and Me.”

UBIQUITY: Does it have a story? A moral?

RASKIN: It the story of how I came to have enough information in my head to design such a thing (and of the many people who guided me), and how I came to learn to put human needs ahead of technical concerns. It's about the things that gave a strong humanitarian and altruistic direction to my life and a lack of interest in making money for its own sake. My parents were a great inspiration; in the 1950s they risked their livelihoods to defend racial equality -- this was before Martin Luther King's prominence and the famous civil rights movement. They achieved some of their goals for our town, but we were boycotted by the white community, lost our family business, and had to move a step down from the middle class. But there was no iota of regret in our household, the moral victory was ours and I have the additional satisfaction that the equality we joined the fight to achieve, if not complete, is far greater today than it was then.

Thank for the Macintosh memories. May you rest in peace.

First, Steve Jobs called "Annie" the stupidest thing ever. Annie was an idea for an easy to use computer. Not a GUI, using a mouse, which Jef Raskin did not want to use either, except for graphics.

Second, everything I have ever read written about or by Jef Raskin, I disagree with. He always came across as pompous and in love with completely impractical ideas. He invented everything, according to him. Read some of the comments on folklore.org that Jef actually made. He may have come up with the idea of the macintosh (although exactly what idea was his, who knows), but the actual box with a mouse that evolved into what we have today he was dead set against at every turn. He hates everything about it, but still wants to take credit for it because doing so makes him feel important... Or something.

He just seemed arrogant and bitter to me. A scorned child, if you will.

There is nothing wrong with being a dreamer whose ideas evolve beyond oneself, but being critical and arrogant bothers me.

He was a smart man with idealism, but little else that doesn't get overshadowed by bitterness and arrogance.

My .02.

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Guest wrote:
All I see right now are iPods, a little tribute would be commendable and respectful of them, rift or no rift with Steve Jobs.

Totally agree. Apple's homepage should say something about him.

"Sorry iLemmings but your hero is one of the most disgraceful CEOs in the country."

Yeah, and you're just a gleaming pillar of morality, what with using the occasion of a man's death as a tool to slander someone.

It's funny, though. You say Jobs stole Rakin's ideas. But Rakin left Apple due to a difference between his ideas and Jobs'. So, you're saying that Steve stole ideas that he was at odds with. You're really a dense one, aren't you?

What's funnier, though, is that I couldn't spell Raskin. Jesus.

Here's a link to a little blog by someone who knew Jef Raskin. It contains a link to Raskin's web site, which I highly recommend.

http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?do=something&id=1040

IMHO, Steve Jobs is vile and traitorous scum, a waste of biomass.