Still, at the very least it’s an eye-opener to read a view so diametrically opposed to the standard mythology, and from such a key player in Apple’s history. I also note that this is from an interview done 24 years ago, and it’s more than possible that Raskin’s opinions changed before he died in 2005. I don’t know enough about Apple history to have a valid opinion. Now, I have no idea how true all this is. In short, Jobs’ only contribution to the Macintosh project was to try unsuccessfully to cancel it. Woz (Steve Wozniak) designed the Apple II. I was very much amused by the recent Newsweek article where he said, “I have a few good designs in me still”. If Jobs would only take credit for what he really did for the industry, that would be more than enough But he also insists on taking credit away from everyone else for what they did, which I think is very unfortunate. For the first two years, Jobs wanted to kill the project because he didn’t understand what it was really about. We went off to a different building and built prototypes of the Macintosh and its software, and got it up and running We were trying to keep the project away from Jobs’ meddling. Fortunately, both Markkula and then-president Mike Scott told Jobs to leave me alone. So I kept out of Jobs’ way and went to then-chairman Mike Markkula and talked over every detail of my idea. Steve Jobs said that it was a crazy idea, that it would never sell, and we didn’t want anything like it. What I proposed was a computer that would be easy to use, mix text and graphics, and sell for about $1,000. Here’s what he says, excerpted from pages 229 to 231: That may all be true but not the way Raskin tells it. It’s generally thought that Jobs’s vision of “a computer for the rest of us” was the driving idea behind the Mac. In recent years, quite a mythology seems to have grown up around Jobs: the standard wisdom is that Apple’s resurgence has come about because of his unique design aesthetic - if you like, almost that Apple is Jobs’s plaything and that whatever nice products come out of it for the rest of us are just a bonus. Raskin does not have a lot of good things to say about Steve Jobs! The Gates interview was particularly fascinating, but the one that caught my eye was with Jef Raskin, the creator of Apple’s Macintosh project. It was published in 1986, in what I can’t help but think of as the golden age of microcomputers, so whereas Siebel’s modern book contains interview with people like Jamie Zawinski (Netscape) and Joshua Bloch (Java Collections), Programmers at Work interviews people like Dan Bricklin (VisiCalc), Gary Kildall (CP/M) and indeed Bill Gates (back when he was a hacker, and the main author of the Microsoft BASIC interpreter). The book consists of a short introduction followed by 19 interviews with various programmers, averaging 15-20 pages each. I’ll review it properly some time soon - but today I just wanted to draw attention to one segment that caught me completely off guard. I bought and read it, and it’s excellent. Back when I reviewed Peter Siebel’s fascinating book of programmer interviews, Coders at Work, Erik Anderson suggested in a comment that I might also enjoy its precursor Programmers at Work.
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