Interview with Jef Raskin

Berkeley Groks talks to Jef Raskin, who started the Apple Macintosh project, about the last 20 years and whats going on these days.

“...that led to my wanting to design the Macintosh when I worked for Apple. At the time, Apple had the Apple II and was working on the Apple III, and even the original Lisa was a character generated machine, and I was proposing a graphics-based machine that I called Macintosh for my favorite kind of apple that grows on trees.”

...

”I’m very disappointed in the Macintosh interface. It’s more complex, harder to use than it was when we started. It’s always puzzling people. Even though I have the latest version, OS X, what they call Panther. The Panther keeps on biting me, crashes once or twice a week. The whole system crashes, individual programs crash pretty often still, but the interface is so complex, there’s so many parts to it that I have to go to other people and ask them how do you do this. Sometimes people come to me. Nobody can understand the whole thing. And of course you don’t get a manual with it. There’s no nice manual that leads you from the beginning: here’s what all these different things do and if you do this, you need to use this secret trick. For instance, when my machine behaves too badly, I have to know to restart it while holding down Command — I’m reading from a cheatsheet that I wrote for myself — Command-Option-O and F, and then at the prompt I type “reset hyphen n, v, r, a, m” and then I have to type on the next line “m, a, c hyphen b, o, o, t” and then things straighten out. Now, does that sound like a friendly interface?”