Jef Raskin’s cul-de-sac and the quest for the humane computer

Consider the cul-de-sac. It leads off the main street past buildings of might-have-been to a dead-end disconnected from the beaten path. Computing history, of course, is filled with such terminal diversions, most never to be fully realized, and many for good reason. Particularly when it comes to user interfaces and how humans interact with computers, a lot of wild ideas deserved the obscure burials they got.

But some deserved better. Nearly every aspiring interface designer believed the way we were forced to interact with computers was limiting and frustrating, but one man in particular felt the emphasis on design itself missed the forest for the trees. Rather than drowning in visual metaphors or arcane iconographies doomed to be as complex as the systems they represented, the way we deal and interact with computers should stress functionality first, simultaneously considering both what users need to do and the cognitive limits they have. It was no longer enough that an interface be usable by a human—it must be humane as well.

What might a computer interface based on those principles look like? As it turns out, we already know.

The man was Jef Raskin, and this is his cul-de-sac.

The Apple core of the Macintosh

It's sometimes forgotten that Raskin was the originator of the Macintosh project in 1979. Raskin had come to Apple with a master's in computer science from Penn State University, six years as an assistant professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and his own consulting company. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs subsequently hired Raskin's company to write the Apple II's BASIC programming manual, and Raskin joined Apple as manager of publications in 1978.

Raskin's work on documentation and testing, combined with his technical acumen, gave him outsized influence within the young company. As the 40-column uppercase-only Apple II was ill-suited for Raskin's writing, Apple developed a text editor and an 80-column display card, and Raskin leveraged his UCSD contacts to port UCSD Pascal and the p-System virtual machine to the Apple II when Steve Wozniak developed the Apple II's floppy disk drives. (Apple sold this as Apple Pascal, and many landmark software programs like the Apple Presents Apple tutorial were written in it.)