Mac Creator Jef Raskin dies aged 61

28 February 2005 21:00 GMT / By Kenneth Henry

Jef Raskin, the Man often credited with creating the Macintosh, died on Saturday aged 61. He has recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died at home with his family.

Raskin joined Apple in 1978, becoming employee 31. His work on the interface of the first Mac included introducing 'revolutionary' concepts such as click and drag. He also came up with the Macintosh name, a take on his favourite variety of Apple, the McIntosh. Raskin put together the original team in order to realise the original version of what we know today. Nobody who disagreed with Steve Jobs ever lasted long though, so Raskin exited the company in 1982. He wrote a study of computer usage, The Human Interface, and founded the science of cognetics, the 'ergonomics of the mind'. His son plans to continue the work of his foundation, The Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces (information at the URL below).

Raskin became a vocal critic of Apple and Mac OS X- and had the pedigree and history to be taken seriously. In an interview with MacUser last year, he said, 'Mac OS X, from a user's point of view, has become a morass of obscure detail. Increasingly, we are sent to Terminal to find some piece of data or do some task, and users have to become Unix hackers. The software is bloated, under-documented, and constraining to developers. The old GUI has not scaled well, and Apple tries to fix it by adding, and adding, and adding instead of rethinking. It is gone from insanely great to insanely gross.' Ironically, he could have quite easily been talking about Windows.

He is survived by his wife, three children and two stepchildren.

Click here for more information on the film that's in the works and which will now attract more interest thanks to the rise in documentaries over the past three years at the cinema.

Click here For information on The Raskin Centre for Human Interfaces.

Quote Source: Dennis Publishing/MacUser

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