Jef Raskin, the computer interface expert who launched the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61.
The author of "The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems," died of cancer at his Pacifica, Calif., home, according to his family.
Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite fruit, joined Apple in January 1978 as employee No. 31. The Macintosh was launched in 1984, but Raskin left Apple in 1982 amid a well-documented dispute with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Raskin was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when he first visited Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. (Apple is often accused of copying Xerox's graphical user interface--GUI--into the Macintosh operating system).
|