A Farewell to Jef Raskin | Toolness
As many of you may already know, Jef Raskin, commonly credited as the creator of the Macintosh computer, died on Saturday, February 26th, 2005. Jef was both my mentor at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2004, and became my employer the following summer, when I began to work with him on his next-generation computing platform, called Archy. This isn’t to say that I was particularly close to the man; my relationship with him was strictly professional, and as such, I don’t know how much I can say about him. But I can say a few things. What struck me most about Jef was the perspective from which he approached computing. For someone who was so deeply involved in the technology industry, his approach was remarkably simple: unlike many other people I’ve known in the field, he wasn’t terribly interested in issues of efficiency, speed, multimedia glitz, or other so-called miracles of technology; he was just interested in helping people. Any interest he had in algorithms or programming