Just over a year ago, in response to what I considered to be a rather stale piece on Jef Raskin, I wrote up some of my own memories. I was extremely saddened to learn of Jef's death over the weekend, so I thought it would be appropriate to re-print last year's notes, especially because I find the obituaries I've just read (e.g. this one at Wired), still seem to miss out on the fundamental pesky/jolly/fun/riotous nature of so many things that Jef did. My memories follow, taken verbatim from my earllier piece.
Jef was a very strong influence on me in my early research career: I had the good luck/fortune to live in his house in Solana beach, California, in the early 70's, while I was a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego. Jef's house was frequently vacant during that period because he was mostly up in the Bay area on sabbatical from his normal life as a Professor of Music (at least that's what I knew him as) at UCSD, checking things out and (like others of that era) being completely blown away by Alan Kay and Kay's Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC. Jef knew that these LRG ideas had to be brought to the masses, and he had some good ideas about how to achieve this.
One of Jef's early achievements among the Apple-II group in his early days at Apple was requiring everyone in his group to use an Apple-II (programming in UCSD-Pascal, which he had brought up with him from Ken Bowles' group at UC San Diego). This in effect required the team to 'live within the environment' as a forcing function to help boostrap the environment into a better state - something unheard of at the time (because such teams would typically have wanted to work on more powerful timesharing systems and minicomputers of the day). I don't know anything about the Raskin/Jobs dynamics, so I can't add to the folklore on this front, but I do know that when I visited Jef at Apple in the late 70's he had that gleam in his eye and said he was going to bring PARC-like tools to the masses, only better!
Jef was in and out of that Solana beach house all the time, even during his sabbatical, and he was doing wonderfully zany things. He used to drive us to restaurants in a huge truck he had, which had a specially-dampened engine compartment so that his musician's hearing would not be adversely damaged by the roar. In the back of the truck he used to carry what I remember as a DG Nova 1200 or PDP-9 minicomputer (remember, we're talking 1973/4), and on occasion would wheel it into a restaurant, complete with one of those DEC VT-52-style consoles, and write a small BASIC program to compute the bill and freak out the staff.
Jef had designed a compact computer language called FLOW, for teaching programming to novices, particularly Arts and Humanities students at UCSD. It was my first exposure to the concept of a 'syntax-directed editing' environment, but this was something Jef had essentially invented and certainly taken to the limits: "You cannot make a syntax error in FLOW," Jef would say proudly, and then proceed to close his eyes, flail away blindly at the keyboard, and compose a syntactically-perfect program-- the editor/interpreter itself dynamically disabled and enabled everything on the keyboard according to the context, so if you pressed a meaningless key, nothing would happen, and ONLY syntactically-correct programs could be written. Nice! This in turn proved to be a profound inspiration for my own work on teaching programming to novices: why should they suffer with idiotic mistakes that the computer itself could have preempted? Jef was uncompromising in his belief that computers ought to be great symbolic engines for the masses, and that designers and engineers should pull out all the stops to make life more pleasant for computer users.
I recall that the living room of Jef's house in Solana beach was unusable, because it was full of fantastic instruments... pianos, organs, harpsichords, all in pristine condition-- seven or eight of 'em. Once in a while he would appear and entertain us with some virtuoso performance. I can't remember exactly what he played, but I can most emphatically remember the style and attitude of his playing: an uncanny humour was evident in the playing, itself a remarkable achievement, because he would not clown around verbally while playing (like, say, Victor Borge), but rather express his humour via the phrasing and composition itself, something I had not experienced before.
[end of verabtim quote from earlier article]
Jef was an inspiration to many, a brilliant musician and scholar, and I think it is both fair and appropriate to note that he was also one of the great jokers and creative pranksters of his era. He made us think, he made us laugh, and he made us listen. Hell, he also gave us the Mac!
