(DIR) Hitori Dake no Renga - The Literate Anti-Comic
 (DIR) Floodgap Gopher Fun and Games
        
       Hitori Dake no Renga - Never Trust a Renga That You Can't Read (38)
        
       Image:
 (IMG) panel-38.jpg
        
       On 24 January 1984, 25 years ago yesterday, Apple introduced
       Macintosh. Naturally Apple was, and still is, strongly associated
       with Steve Jobs, who founded Apple, was unwise enough to get into
       a land war in Asia with John Sculley, founded NeXT, got bought by
       Apple, and took Apple back over. And I hope that Jobs really just
       has, as he claims, "a hormonal imbalance" and not a recurrence of
       his malignancy because pancreatic cancer is a horrible way to
       die.
        
       However, I don't think enough people give credit to Jef Raskin
       (r.i.p.), who started the Macintosh project in 1979 when the
       Apple II was still in full swing. There is no doubt that Jobs was
       the biggest impetus to incorporating Xerox PARC's GUI-driven
       system into the Mac after he was kicked off the Lisa, but
       Raskin's original Mac was still a useability marvel, similar in
       basic physical appearance with the cute little monitor and disk
       drive, but using a smart keyboard that anticipated user input and
       switched modes dynamically. After the Mac became a GUI prototype,
       it was Raskin who pushed for the iconic single button mouse.
       After Raskin left Apple in 1982, he later created the 1987 Canon
       Cat (which I am proud to own a surviving model of), superficially
       a word processor, but using an innovative interface with a long
       single text stream, unique keys, and a hidden mode allowing
       programming in Forth and assembly. The machine was a failure
       commercially, but remains much loved. Raskin himself succumbed to
       pancreatic cancer in 2005. His son Aza carries on his father's
       legacy at Mozilla Labs.
        
       This is the Mac's legacy: while not the first to use such an
       interface, nor arguably the best, it was the best-known and the
       one virtually every competitor targeted specifically. Today, in
       2009, we are all using Macs.
        
       This Mac is my personal Mac Plus. It has 4MB of RAM and a 20MB
       hard disk. I use a G5 so I can still run Classic apps.
        
       Copyright 2009 Cameron Kaiser except noted. All rights reserved.
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