It All Began with "Annie" – The Vision of a Computer for the Masses
Mike Markkula (1977)
Raskin had been responsible for Apple’s publications, particularly manuals, and actually was to more intensely oversee the developers writing the applications for the Apple II. “I told him [Markkula] it was a fine project, but I wasn’t terribly interested in a 500 dollar game machine,” Raskin later remembered. “However, there was this thing that I’d been dreaming about – it was [that] it would be designed from a human factors perspective, which at that time was totally incomprehensible.”
In fall 1979, Raskin wrote his article “Computers by the Millions“, in which he drafted his version of a computer for the masses. Markkula insisted on the report to be treated as a confidential internal report. The essay was not published until 1982 in the SIGPC Newsletter, Vol. 5, No. 2.
Raskin had chosen a completely new approach, because until then, the “technically feasible” is what defined a computer’s design. The academic computer scientist, who had kept secret his diploma from the Apple founders at the time of his appointment (as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs approached academics extremely distrustfully), wanted to design a computer for the normal person in the street – which of course could not to be unattainable.
The expression of the “Person in the Street” formed by Raskin became a dictum at Apple – abbreviated as PITS. Raskin’s first draft envisioned a closed computer including monitor, keyboard and printer able to work without any external wires – and all that for 500 dollars. In return, the Macintosh should only be equipped with a tiny five inch display, a cheap CPU (6809) and a main memory calculated extremely tight at 64 kilobytes.
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Category: Computer History, Mac
www.mac-history.de
Canon made it but the software for the Cat was exceedingly carefully built by the Information Appliance team. With 20,000 sold, no user ever reported a bug in the operating system. I found a typo on a help screen, though. In seven years, Jef never hinted to me that Jobs had anything to do with Canon stopping the Cat.
Richard, thank you very much for this information.
I enjoy the photo. I hadn’t seen that one. It is amazing how much Aza and Jef look alike (minus the beard, although Aza could have one to rival that if he let it grow!)