Jef Raskin Quotes

MacUser: If you could change one thing, what would it be? Jef Raskin: To not have people assume you can rank every-thing one dimensionally. Or have everybody realise that killing people is not a way to solve problems.

One of the prophets of the personal computer industry, Alan Kay, has said that the true personal computer has not yet been made. I disagree. We have, as the ancient curse warns us, gotten what we asked for. We do indeed have computers being bought by individuals for themselves; they are "personal computers". The problem is that many of us didn't want computers in the first place -- computers are merely boxes for running programs -- we wanted the benefits that computer technology has to offer. What we wanted was to ease the workload in information related areas much as washing machines and vacuum cleaners ease the workload in maintaining cleanliness.

Human logic [emphasis added] was forced on us by the physical world and is therefore consistent with it. Mathematics derives from logic. This is why mathematics is consistent with the physical world.

A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.

It would be wonderful if we could just tuck in a few loose ends and change a handful of details of present systems to have them work properly. Unfortunately, we have learned that the GUI concept has fundamental flaws that cannot be corrected by small changes. These flaws have to do with incompatibilities between the designs of both GUIs and command-line interfaces and the way our brains are wired. As we cannot change the way our minds work, we must change the interface design.

I'm developing cross platform now, and I'm as interested in helping as many people as possible to have a better experience when using computers. Morality demands that I write for Wintel machines first (Linux comes along free), and port to Macs when there is time.

An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.

How in the world do you sell something that's different? That's the biggest problem. The world's not quite ready to believe. It's like in the early days at Apple, they said, "What's it good for?" We couldn't give a really good answer so they assumed the machine wasn't going to sell. But I do know the way I plan to sell my product is by word of mouth. Some people will try it and say, "This product really gets my job done. It doesn't have fifteen fonts. I can't print it out in old gothic banners five feet long, but I sure got that article finished under the deadline." That's how I can sell it. Later, people will understand it.

Right now, computers, which are supposed to be our servant, are oppressing us.

As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.

He acts without thinking and with bad judgment.

What I proposed was a computer that would be easy to use, mix text and graphics, and sell for about $1,000. Steve Jobs said that it was a crazy idea, that it would never sell, and we didn't want anything like it. He tried to shoot the project down.

MacUser: Which person do you most admire? Jef Raskin: For what attribute? Once again you ask a question that linearises a complex matter. I can name many. Let's start with people named George: George Cantor for moving infinity out of philosophy into mathematics, George Washington for showing how a leader should relinquish power, and George Bernard Shaw for his humanity... Or we can do it by subject and admire Aristotle, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein for their pulling from nature comprehensible laws; or Euclid, Gauss and Gödel for their contributions to mathematics; or people who have influenced me very directly, in which case I'd mention my very admirable parents and the teacher who taught me to be intellectually independent, L R Genise; or how about Claude Shannon without whose work on information theory I would have been lost.

I hate mice. The mouse involves you in arm motions that slow you down. I didn't want it on the Macintosh, but Jobs insisted. In those days, what he said went, good idea or not.

By choosing to focus on computers rather than the tasks we wanted done, we inherited much of the baggage that had accumulated around earlier generations of computers. It is more a matter of style and operating systems that need elaborate user interfaces to support huge application programs. These structures demand ever larger memories and complex peripherals. It's as if we had asked for a bit of part-time help and were given a bureaucracy.