Raskin himself told me he had a firm order for 200,000 machines from a large corporate. The project was taken up - and utterly destroyed - by Canon, which bought all rights, developed the IA into the Canon Cat, and as far as anybody can tell, refused to sell (or allow anybody else to sell) a single model. It did everything, on a floppy disk in an Apple. If people tell you that the best ideas succeed, show them the IA. Only years later was he recognised as 'the father of the Mac' and I think it was the millionth Macintosh which was presented to him to honour that achievement.
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His job there had been to design the Mac, something his break with Jobs meant was not credited to him - they even left his signature off the inside of the Mac case, which supposedly had everybody's name who was associated with the project. We became good enough friends that I would stop by his house there - and, later, in Pacifica - whenever I was in town.Īt that time, Raskin had fallen out with Steve Jobs, and was shortly to be eased out of his job with Apple.
I also discovered what a real aeronautical engineer was like, what a real typographer was like, what a real sculptor was like, what a real composer was like, what a real inventor was like, and just what a nice guy this short, round and rather pompously cheerful bundle of energy was, too. In the next two hours, I found out what a real programmer was like. The pianist was Raskin himself, on his own grand. And as I entered the room, I realised that this wasn't reproduction. The disk playing was something fiendishly complex by Rachmaninov. 'Come in!' he called from upstairs and when I got there, I realised that part of the quality of the sound - piano music really is hard to reproduce perfectly! - just had to be the size of the room, which would easily seat 40. When I arrived at the vast house in the forest, dodging deer while driving up the road to his front door, my first thought was that he had about the best Hi-Fi system I'd ever heard. I ran into him at a San Francisco party given shortly after the launch of the Apple Mac which, he told me (interrupting my conversation with Jim Warren to say: 'You really ought to interview me, you know!') was his design. This software is The Information Appliance.' And he demonstrated his software, running on an old Apple II, and it was amazing.Įverything he did was amazing. An Information Appliance is something with a processor in it, but which has a function.
Obituary 'A computer,' Jef Raskin told me in his house in the hills above Palo Alto, 'is a device for running programs.
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