
#JEF RASKIN MANUAL#
Raskin joined Apple in 1978 as the director of publications and wrote the manual for the Apple II.
#JEF RASKIN SOFTWARE#
Raskin entered a graduate music program at the University of California at San Diego, but stopped to teach art, photography and computer science there, working as an assistant professor from 1970 until 1974.Īfter founding a software consulting company, Mr. His first computer program, a music program, was part of his master's thesis. He earned a master's degree in computer science at Pennsylvania State University in 1967. Raskin studied mathematics and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, graduating in 1965. He was an accomplished musician, composer, conductor and painter, as well as a mathematician, book author and model airplane designer.īorn in New York City, Mr. "He really spent his life urging a degree of simplicity where computers would be not only easy to use but delightful," said Steven Levy, a technology writer and the author of "Insanely Great," a history of the Macintosh computer.īy almost any measure, Mr. But he is credited with providing the vision for the Macintosh, the highly accessible and affordable computer that hit stores in 1984. Raskin left Apple in 1982 after his relationship with Steve Jobs, the company's co-founder, soured. He wanted to make them more usable and friendly to people who weren't geeks." "You had to be some kind of geek to even want to use a computer. Raskin recruited to work at Apple in 1978. "At that time, computers were for nerds," said Bill Atkinson, a software designer who Mr. Raskin advocated forcefully for the company to develop a computer that was easy for people to use, and he headed the Macintosh project starting in 1979. As the 31st employee at Apple Computer, Mr. Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite apple but altered the spelling for copyright reasons, played a significant role in transforming computers into friendlier machines, helping to catapult them into the commercial sphere. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Linda Blum. We Are All Blind: Cognetics and the Designing of Interfaces for Accessibility: Introductio.Jef Raskin, a computer technology pioneer who started the team that created the Macintosh computer, died Saturday at his home in Pacifica, Calif., at age 61. Turning the Art of Interface Design into Engineering.ĮHCI 2001 - Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction, 8th IFIP International Conference Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 87 Conference Proceedings of the ACM CHI 89 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference Systemic Implications of Leap and an Improved Two-Part Cursor: A Case Study. Wanted for Crimes Against the Interface: Thoughts on an HCI Poster.Ī Concern about the Samuelson-Glushko Survey. Looking for a Humane Interface: Will Computers Ever Become Easy to Use?. The User Interface in Text Retrieval Systems Revisited, A Letter to the Editor. He occasionally wrote for computer publications, such as Dr. It was during this period that Jef changed the spelling of his name from Jeff to Jef after meeting Jon and liking the lack of extraneous letters. He curated several art shows including one featuring his collection of unusual toys. It was also the basis for programming classes taught by Jef and Jon in the UCSD Visual Arts Dept. The language utilized "typing amplification" in which only the first letter was typed and the computer provided the balance of the instruction eliminating typing errors. The language had only 6 instructions (get it, print it, print "text", jump to, if it is ' ' then & stop) and could not manipulate numbers.

The language was first used at the Humanities Summer Training Institute held in 1970 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Along with his undergraduate student Jonathan (Jon) Collins, Jef developed the Flow Programming Language for use in teaching programming to the art and humanities students. He was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to establish a Computer and Humanities center which used a 16 bit Data General Nova computer and graphic display terminals rather than the teletypes which were in use at that time. Raskin later enrolled in a graduate music program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), but stopped to teach art, photography and computer science there, working as an assistant professor in the Visual Arts dept from 1968 until 1974. In 1967 he earned a master's degree in computer science at Pennsylvania State University. 1965) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Raskin was born in New York City to a secular Jewish family. Jef Raskin (MaFebruary 26, 2005) was an American human-computer interface expert best known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple in the late 1970s.
