Jef Raskin's Cul-De-Sac and the Quest for the Humane Computer

It's a travesty that more computer people aren't familiar with Jeff and also his son Aza. Ubiquity is brilliant (I recently used Claude to create a functional Chrome port) and the idea of, "highly useable information appliances" is still years ahead of its time. To me it seems like the most, "visionary" voices have been largely ignored by the industry- Engelbart, Ingalls/Kay, Raskin(s), Brenda Laurel, Ted Nelson (...)

The funny thing is that given how crap things have gotten it doesn't seem like it would be very hard at all to architect a, "radically improved" version of modern computer interfaces. We even have LLMs to help facilitate parts of the system that might have been historically difficult to implement. Why not instead of building a, "modern" Windows or Mac OS you made a, "useable" version which was optimized to run on anything or could run with any stalling on a modern computer? I don't want Windows 11; I want Windows 25' I want it to work orders of magnitude faster than Windows 98 rather than using Moore's Law to create something that can, "do more with more resources but averages out to roughly the same experience as previous generations."

We're still effectively using the same computers we were using when I was a kid in the 1990s.

"The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin is a classic. So many great or novel ideas in it.

In 2018 I ran across this:

https://www.fugue.co/blog/2015-11-11-guide-to-emacs.html - Recreates (Jef Raskin's) Archy-like philosophy and workflow in emacs, including some customizations: "Ace Jump Mode ... works a bit like Jef Raskin's Leap feature from days gone by." Explicitly references Archy's predecessor, the Canon Cat

But now clicking on that URL brings up something completely different.

It would be very interesting to put together a system for the Raspberry Pi which focused on these ideas, esp. paired with interface hardware to support it (though of course, that is a total inversion of his idea of computer as unexpandable appliance).

Interesting that the inventor of the KoalaPad tablet (an early graphics tablet for 8-bit computers --- I can recall using one on a Commodore 64 in the high school computer lab) was a user of and advocate for the "Swyftcard":

>writing for A+ in November 1985, said it “accomplished something that I never

>knew was possible. It not only outperforms any Apple II word-processing system,

>but it lets the Apple IIe outperform the Macintosh… Will Rogers was right: it

>does take genius to make things simple.”

Or, perhaps someone could explore a nice version of the Oberon programming environment on the Raspberry Pi? (apparently drivers are the big hold-up?)

It is interesting to compare/contrast/augment this story with those from folklore.org

  New team member Bud Tribble suggested that it should be able to take 
  advantage of the Lisa's powerful graphics routines by migrating to its 
  Motorola 68000, and by February 1981, Smith was able to duly redesign the 
  prototype for the more powerful CPU while maintaining its lower-cost 8-bit 
  data bus.
  
  This new prototype expanded graphics to 384x256, allowed the use of more RAM, 
  and ran at 8 MHz, making the prototype noticeably faster than the 5 MHz Lisa 
  yet substantially cheaper. 

From folklore.org:

  The idea was what [Smith] called a "bus transformer" circuit, built out of 
  PAL chips, which adapted the 68000 to an 8 bit memory bus by exploiting the 
  fast "page mode" access mode of the RAMs. The new Macintosh, designed over 
  the Christmas break at the end of 1980, featured an 8 megahertz 68000, 64K of 
  RAM, and a 384 by 256 bit mapped display. It was 60% faster than the Lisa 
  (which used a 5 megahertz 68000) but a lot less expensive.

https://www.folklore.org/Five_Different_Macs.html

This is absolutely fascinating. As usual for Dr Cam, it’s long, very deep, very discursive, and probes superficially disconnected areas. It could almost be calculated to distract me for ages.

Great stuff. I wish someone ported the tForth code and made a standalone text editor (or word processor or even integrated app) that incorporated as much as possible of this editing technology as could be adapted to standard PC/Mac hardware, keyboards, UI controls and so on.

There is also a chapter on Jef Raskin in "Programmers at Work - Interviews" by Susan Lammers.