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Jef Raskin, March 9, 1943 - February 26, 2005

This obituary, issued by his family, recalls his remarkable achievements:
Jef created the Macintosh Computer as employee number 31 at Apple in the early 1980s, revolutionizing computer interface design. Jef established many methods now taken for granted by computer users, such as "click and drag." He named the Macintosh project after his favorite variety of apple, the McIntosh (modifying the spelling for copyright purposes). Jef strongly believed that computers should make tasks easy for people, not the other way around.

Jef viewed good design as a moral duty, holding interface designers to the same ethical standards as surgeons. Alluding to Isaac Asimov's first law of robotics, one of Jef's mantras was that "any system shall not harm your content or, through inaction, allow your content to come to harm."
There's a lot to be rediscovered about the contributions of Jef Raskin to the lifestyles of everyone sitting at their computers today reading this sad news. But, for those of us who appreciate the impact of naming and branding on our lives, this short note from Jef's own writings is particularly interesting, in retrospect:
In the spring of 1979 I went to the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Apple, Mike Markkula, and proposed that Apple build a new kind of computer. It was to be inexpensive; have a small footprint; use a built-in, graphics-based screen; and—my most heretical point— it would be based on human factors considerations rather than driven by whatever was hottest in electronic technology at the moment. My name for this project was "Macintosh".
Today, this classic name seems so obviously "right" that the creative genius is not often given the credit he deserves for coming up with the "Macintosh" name in a corporate environment where, to others, it seemed like a good idea at the time to name a computer the Apple IIe, or as branding guru Steve Jobs might have named the computer with the first graphical user interface, LISA, after his eldest daughter.
Posted by abnu on Monday, February 28, 2005 @ 7:38 AM [ + ]

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