[HN Gopher] Dr. Dobb's Journal Interviews Jef Raskin (1986)
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Dr. Dobb's Journal Interviews Jef Raskin (1986)
Author : rbanffy
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-05-15 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (computeradsfromthepast.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (computeradsfromthepast.substack.com)
| codepoet80 wrote:
| I read his book during my early years of software development, as
| a big fan of the (early) Mac and with a real passion to build
| better user experiences in industrial software. I often wonder
| what Jef would think of the iPhone (or even the current Mac), if
| he were still with us. I suspect he'd be deeply disappointed.
| throwaway6723 wrote:
| Jef Raskin got cut out of the Macintosh project by Steve Jobs
| and he held a grudge about that. Unclear if he'd be deeply
| disappointed for personal or technical reasons.
| uxhacker wrote:
| I recently have also been thinking about Jef Raskin's book The
| Humane Interface. It feels increasingly relevant to now.
|
| Raskin was deeply concerned with how humans think in vague,
| associative, creative ways, while computers demand precision and
| predictability.
|
| His goal was to humanize the machine through thoughtful interface
| design--minimizing modes, reducing cognitive load, and
| anticipating user intent.
|
| What's fascinating now is how AI, changes the equation entirely.
| Instead of rigid systems requiring exact input, we now have tools
| that themselves are fuzzy, and probabilistic.
|
| I keep thinking that the gap Raskin was trying to bridge is
| closing--not just through interface, but through the architecture
| of the machine itself.
|
| So AI makes Raskin's vision more feasible than ever but also
| challenges his assumptions:
|
| Does AI finally enable truly humane interfaces?
| rendx wrote:
| Highly recommended, timeless read!
| growlNark wrote:
| > Does AI finally enable truly humane interfaces?
|
| Perhaps, but I don't think we're going to see evidence of this
| for quite a while. It would be really cool if the computer
| adapted to how you naturally want to use it, though, without
| forcing you through an interface where you talk/type to it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| "no" .. intelligent appliance was the product that came out of
| Raskin's thinking..
|
| I object to the framing of this question directly -- there is
| no definition of "AI" . Secondly, the humane interface is a
| genre that Jef Raskin shaped and re-thought over years.. A one-
| liner here definitely does not embody the works of Jef Raskin.
|
| Off the top of my head, it appears that "AI" enables one-to-
| many broadcast, service interactions and knowledge retrieval in
| a way that was not possible before. The thinking of Jef Raskin
| was very much along the lines of an ordinary person using
| computers for their own purposes. "AI" in the supply-side
| format coming down the road, appears to be headed towards
| societal interactions that depersonalize and segregate
| individual people. It is possible to engage "AI" whatever that
| means, to enable individuals as an appliance. This is by no
| means certain at this time IMHO.
| ianbicking wrote:
| "Does AI finally enable truly humane interfaces?"
|
| I think it does; LLMs in particular. AI also enables a ton of
| other things, many of them inhumane, which can make it very
| hard to discuss these things as people fixate on the inhumane.
| (Which is fair... but if you are BUILDING something, I think
| it's best to fixate on the humane so that you conjure THAT into
| being.)
|
| I think Jef Raskin's goal with a lot of what he proposed was to
| connect the computer interface more directly with the user's
| intent. An application-oriented model really focuses so much of
| the organization around the software company's intent and
| position, something that follows us fully into (most of)
| today's interfaces.
|
| A magical aspect of LLMs is that they can actually fully
| vertically integrate with intent. It doesn't mean every LLM
| interface exposes this or takes advantage of this (quite the
| contrary!), but it's _possible_, and it simple wasn't possible
| in the past.
|
| For instance: you can create an LLM-powered piece of software
| that collects (and allows revision) to some overriding intent.
| Just literally take the user's stated intent and puts it in a
| slot in all following prompts. This alone will have a
| substantial effect on the LLMs behavior! And importantly you
| can ask for their intent, not just their specific goal. Maybe I
| want to build a shed, and I'm looking up some materials... the
| underlying goal can inform all kinds of things, like whether
| I'm looking for used or new materials, aesthetic or functional,
| etc.
|
| To accomplish something with a computer we often thread
| together many different tools. Each of them is generally
| defined by their function (photo album, email client, browser-
| that-contains-other-things, and so on). It's up to the human to
| figure out how to assemble these, and at each step it's easy to
| lose track, to become distracted or confused, to lose track of
| context. And again an LLM can engage with the larger task in a
| way that wasn't possible before.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Tell me, how does doing any of the things you've suggested
| help with the huge range of computer-driven tasks that have
| nothing to do with language? Video editing, audio editing,
| music composition, architectural and mechanical design, the
| list is vast and nearly endless.
|
| LLMs have no role to play in any of that, because their job
| is text generation. At best, they could generate excerpts
| from a half-imagined user manual ...
| uxhacker wrote:
| Because some LLMs are now multimodal--they can process and
| generate not just text, but also sound and visuals. In
| other words, they're beginning to handle a broader range of
| human inputs and outputs, much like we do.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Those are not LLMs. They use the same foundational
| technology (pick what you like, but I'd say transformers)
| to accomplish tasks that require entirely different
| training data and architectures.
|
| I was specifically asking about LLMs because the comment
| I replied to only talked about LLMs - Large Language
| Models.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Multimodal LLMs are absolutely LLMs, the language is just
| not human language.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| What if you could pilot your video editing tool through
| voice? Have a multimodal LLM convert your instructions into
| some structured data instruction that gets used by the
| editor to perform actions.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Training LLMs to generate some internal command structure
| for a tool is conceptually similar to what we've done
| with them already, but the training data for it is
| essentially non-existent, and would be hard to generate.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Compare pinch zoom to the tedious scene in Bladerunner
| where Deckard is asking the computer to zoom in to a
| picture.
| yubblegum wrote:
| Deckard. Blade Runner.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Does AI finally enable truly humane interfaces?
|
| This is something I keep tossing over in my head. Multimodal
| capabilities of frontier models right now are fantastic. Rather
| than locking into a desktop with peripherals or hunching over a
| tiny screen and tapping with thumbs we finally have an easy way
| to create apps that interact "natively" through audio. We can
| finally try to decipher a user's intent rather than forcing the
| user to interact through an interface designed to provide
| precise inputs to an algorithm. I'm excited to see what we
| build with these things.
| janfoeh wrote:
| _By definition, an operating system is the program you have to
| fight with before you can fight with an application._
|
| One for the quote file.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Wow. EGA graphics on the cover. That's not something I've heard
| about in a while...
| ianbicking wrote:
| Someone built a legit commercial game with EGA graphics just
| last year:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1098770/The_Crimson_Diamo...
|
| I haven't played it, but looking at the graphics alone brings
| up some deep feelings of nostalgia
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, she really likes her EGA palette. That's cool.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| Cookie popup keeps popping up if I allow only necessary cookies
| on an article about frustrating interactions with technology. (FF
| on Android)
| emorning3 wrote:
| I suspect that Jef Raskin would not be down with "prompt
| engineering' at all.
|
| I think that Mr Raskin's opinion would be that it should be
| obvious how to use a piece of software.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Prompt engineering, it seems to me, is about the most obvious
| way to use a computer: Tell it in plain English what you want.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you are assuming clarity and good faith on the other side of
| the model providers
| TMWNN wrote:
| 1995 article by Raskin (page 9) in the _Journal of the Computer
| History Association of California_ :
| <http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/chac/CHAC_Analytical_Engine/2.4...>
| kristianp wrote:
| He was selling a product called swyftcard for Apple II, see
| https://hackaday.com/2014/04/06/vcf-east-the-swyft-card/
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Let me make a typical error. I want to move the cursor to the
| word good, so I should press the left Leap key and type "good."
| I'll press the right Leap key and type. It found it anyway. The
| system does one thing that all systems should have done from day
| 1: If you tell it to search one way for something and it doesn't
| find it, it searches the other way in case you made a mistake.
| Most systems didn't do this because if you did find it then
| you've lost your place. In this system if you want to go back,
| you just bang on the keyboard. (Raskin slams both hands on the
| keyboard, and the cursor returns to the point in the document at
| which his search began.)
|
| We're supposed to idolize this as some sort of hyper-enlightened
| version of interface design? Hell no.
|
| I get that this design worked for Raskin. It worked for him the
| same way that my hacked version of GNU Emacs' next-line function
| does for me when the cursor is at the end of the buffer, or how I
| needed a version of its delete-horizontal-space but that would
| work only _after_ the cursor.
|
| I get that Raskin's "oh, you probably made a mistake, let me do
| something else that I suspect is what you really meant" might
| even have worked for a bunch of other people too. But the idea
| that somehow Raskin had some sort of deep insight with stuff like
| this, rather than just a set of personal preferences that are
| like those of anyone else, is just completely wrong, I think.
| jaysonelliot wrote:
| You're making the error of judging Raskin's approach with the
| knowledge of user interfaces that a person in 2025 has. It's
| been 40 years since that interview. Many people today weren't
| even born yet.
|
| In that 40 years, many UI conventions have sprung up, and we've
| internalized them to the point that they're so familiar we
| actually say they're intuitive.
|
| But if you go back to the state of computing in 1986, or even
| earlier, when Raskin was developing his UX principles for the
| Canon Cat and the SwyftCard, he was considering computer
| interfaces that were almost exclusively command-line
| interfaces.
|
| You're not supposed to "idolize" any designer or engineer. But
| I would highly encourage you to read The Humane Interface,
| learn about the underlying principles of usability and
| interface design, and consider how you'd apply them to a UI
| today, 40 years later. The execution you'd come up with would
| be different. But the principles he started from are
| foundational and very useful.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You're making the mistake of thinking I wasn't using
| computers in 1986 :)
|
| I used GNU Emacs as an example for precisely this reason.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Further, I have read several sections of The Humane
| Interface, and I think it does contain some real insight,
| some of which we have unfortunately lost.
|
| But I do not think that Raskin was channelling some
| remarkable stream of insight into these matters. And yes,
| "idolize" was more poking fun at people who use superlatives
| to describe him, in my opinion without much justification.
| mongol wrote:
| Raskin was a fan of "zoomable interfaces" as I recall.
| Remember reading about a huge canvas which you navigate and
| can zoom in and out of.
|
| Today we have Miro and it works like that. I hate it.
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