Jef Raskin's cul-de-sac and the quest for the humane computer
10 comments
·September 12, 2025AfterHIA
pixelpoet
I had the privilege of hanging out with Aza at a media lab kinda thing in California, my first trip to the US: https://sites.google.com/view/stochasticlabsfractalworkshop/...
Was a very memorable time, great research and great people <3
detourdog
Those luminaries have such dense ideas that practicalities require glossing over the details. Each one of their ideas has had mass adoption but the details are often lost in implementation. Each year it becomes more feasible for an individual to hold theirs ideals and produce a thing of quality. Mass production and the ease of distribution has never been more accessible. Their ideas will hit when the timing is right.
fouc
"The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin is a classic. So many great or novel ideas in it.
a4isms
I share "Intuitive Equals Familiar" on a regular basis. And here I go again:
Oddskar
Seconded! I think it's a much better read than "Design of Everyday things".
He was clearly a super experienced practitioner. If only the Apple of today actually did good UX again instead of catering to the whims of some "design genius"
null
adolph
It is interesting to compare/contrast/augment this story with those from folklore.org
New team member Bud Tribble suggested that it should be able to take
advantage of the Lisa's powerful graphics routines by migrating to its
Motorola 68000, and by February 1981, Smith was able to duly redesign the
prototype for the more powerful CPU while maintaining its lower-cost 8-bit
data bus.
This new prototype expanded graphics to 384x256, allowed the use of more RAM,
and ran at 8 MHz, making the prototype noticeably faster than the 5 MHz Lisa
yet substantially cheaper.
The idea was what [Smith] called a "bus transformer" circuit, built out of
PAL chips, which adapted the 68000 to an 8 bit memory bus by exploiting the
fast "page mode" access mode of the RAMs. The new Macintosh, designed over
the Christmas break at the end of 1980, featured an 8 megahertz 68000, 64K of
RAM, and a 384 by 256 bit mapped display. It was 60% faster than the Lisa
(which used a 5 megahertz 68000) but a lot less expensive.
It's a travesty that more computer people aren't familiar with Jeff and also his son Aza. Ubiquity is brilliant (I recently used Claude to create a functional Chrome port) and the idea of, "highly useable information appliances" is still years ahead of its time. To me it seems like the most, "visionary" voices have been largely ignored by the industry- Engelbart, Ingalls/Kay, Raskin(s), Brenda Laurel, Ted Nelson (...)
The funny thing is that given how crap things have gotten it doesn't seem like it would be very hard at all to architect a, "radically improved" version of modern computer interfaces. We even have LLMs to help facilitate parts of the system that might have been historically difficult to implement. Why not instead of building a, "modern" Windows or Mac OS you made a, "useable" version which was optimized to run on anything or could run with any stalling on a modern computer? I don't want Windows 11; I want Windows 25' I want it to work orders of magnitude faster than Windows 98 rather than using Moore's Law to create something that can, "do more with more resources but averages out to roughly the same experience as previous generations."
We're still effectively using the same computers we were using when I was a kid in the 1990s.