Misplaced Pages

#957042

81-619: Jef Raskin (born Jeff Raskin ; March 9, 1943 – February 26, 2005) was an American human–computer interface expert who conceived and began leading the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s. Jef Raskin was born in New York City to a secular Jewish family, whose surname is a matronymic from "Raske", Yiddish nickname for Rachel. He received a BA in mathematics and a BS in physics with minors in philosophy and music from Stony Brook University . In 1967, he received

162-425: A master's degree in computer science from Pennsylvania State University , after having switched from mathematical logic due to differences of opinion with his advisor. Even though he had completed work typical for a PhD, the university was not accredited for a PhD in computer science. The first original computer application he wrote was a music application as part of his master's thesis. Raskin later enrolled in

243-480: A text editor and separate formatter program. Stuart Woods wrote his second novel, Run Before the Wind , using WordMaster on a PolyMorphic 8813 system. With the introduction of double-sided, double density minifloppy drives, the storage capacity of a single floppy became approximately 360K bytes (the same as the original IBM-PC floppy drive capacity). This made it feasible to store Exec, applications and data on

324-517: A 5-slot S100 chassis, with additional side-mounted S-100 connectors for the purpose of joining chassis together. This unit earned the nickname "orange toaster" due to its orange metal cover, and the fact that the S-100 cards generated noticeable heat. The Poly-88 was available in kit form, or assembled. It was originally called the Micro-Altair, but after objections from MITS , manufacturers of

405-426: A Professor at MIT . Raskin discouraged using the informal term " intuitive " in user interface design, claiming that easy to use interfaces are often due to exposure to previous, similar systems, thus the term "familiar" should be preferred. Aiming for "intuitive" interfaces (based on reusing existing skills with interaction systems) could lead designers to discard a better design solution only because it would require

486-542: A ZUI or Zooming User Interface . In the same period, Raskin accepted an appointment as Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago 's Computer Science Department and, with Leo Irakliotis , started designing a new curriculum on humane interfaces and computer enterprises. His work is being extended and carried on by his son Aza Raskin at Humanized, a company that was started shortly after Raskin's death to continue his legacy. Humanized released Enso,

567-637: A commercial success. Raskin claimed that its failure was due in some part to Steve Jobs, who successfully pitched Canon on the NeXT Computer at about the same time. It has also been suggested that Canon canceled the Cat due to internal rivalries within its divisions. After running a cryptic full page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal that the "Canon Cat is coming" months before it was available, Canon failed to follow through, never airing

648-497: A computer with a man's name to cost more than a machine with a woman's name. Other research finds that individuals perceive their interactions with computers more negatively than humans, despite behaving the same way towards these machines. In human and computer interactions, a semantic gap usually exists between human and computer's understandings towards mutual behaviors. Ontology , as a formal representation of domain-specific knowledge, can be used to address this problem by solving

729-688: A current user interface , or designing a new user interface: The iterative design process is repeated until a sensible, user-friendly interface is created. Various strategies delineating methods for human–PC interaction design have developed since the conception of the field during the 1980s. Most plan philosophies come from a model for how clients, originators, and specialized frameworks interface. Early techniques treated clients' psychological procedures as unsurprising and quantifiable and urged plan specialists to look at subjective science to establish zones, (for example, memory and consideration) when structuring UIs. Present-day models, in general, center around

810-669: A display is designed, the task that the display is intended to support must be defined (e.g., navigating, controlling, decision making, learning, entertaining, etc.). A user or operator must be able to process whatever information a system generates and displays; therefore, the information must be displayed according to principles to support perception, situation awareness, and understanding. Christopher Wickens et al. defined 13 principles of display design in their book An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering . These human perception and information processing principles can be utilized to create an effective display design. A reduction in errors,

891-531: A graduate music program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), but quit to teach art, photography, and computer science there. He worked as an assistant professor in the Visual Arts department from 1968 until 1974. There, he presented shows about toys as works of art. Raskin announced his resignation from the assistant professorship by flying over the Chancellor's house in a hot air balloon. He

SECTION 10

#1732773073958

972-424: A linguistic command-line interface, which is based on Jef's work and dedicated in his memory. In early 2008, Humanized became part of Mozilla . The Archy project never included a functional ZUI, but a third party developed a commercial application called Raskin inspired by the same Zoomworld ZUI idea. Raskin expanded the meaning of the term "cognetics" in his book The Humane Interface to mean "the ergonomics of

1053-487: A manual). The use of knowledge in a user's head and knowledge in the world must be balanced for an effective design. 12. Principle of predictive aiding . Proactive actions are usually more effective than reactive actions. A display should eliminate resource-demanding cognitive tasks and replace them with simpler perceptual tasks to reduce the user's mental resources. This will allow the user to focus on current conditions and to consider possible future conditions. An example of

1134-613: A model airplane room. He said, "I decided when I grew up I was not going to give up the things I liked doing, and I've not." He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2004 and died in Pacifica, California , on February 26, 2005, at age 61. Human%E2%80%93computer interface As a field of research, human–computer interaction is situated at the intersection of computer science , behavioral sciences , design , media studies , and several other fields of study . The term

1215-720: A novel approach. Raskin had interests other than computers. He conducted the San Francisco Chamber Opera Society and played various instruments, including the organ and the recorder . His artwork was displayed at New York's Museum of Modern Art as part of its permanent collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the University of California, San Diego. He received a patent for airplane wing construction, and designed and marketed radio controlled model gliders . He

1296-456: A predictive aid is a road sign displaying the distance to a certain destination. 13. Principle of consistency . Old habits from other displays will easily transfer to support the processing of new displays if they are designed consistently. A user's long-term memory will trigger actions that are expected to be appropriate. A design must accept this fact and utilize consistency among different displays. Topics in human–computer interaction include

1377-442: A reduction in required training time, an increase in efficiency, and an increase in user satisfaction are a few of the many potential benefits that can be achieved by utilizing these principles. Certain principles may not apply to different displays or situations. Some principles may also appear to be conflicting, and there is no simple solution to say that one principle is more important than another. The principles may be tailored to

1458-779: A set of interlocking wood blocks. One of Raskin's instruments was the organ. In 1978 he published an article in BYTE on using computers with the instrument. Raskin published a paper highly critical of pseudoscience in nursing, such as therapeutic touch and Rogerian science , wherein he said: "Unlike science, nursing theory has no built-in mechanisms for rejecting falsehoods, tautologies, and irrelevancies." Jef Raskin married Linda S. Blum in 1982. They had three children together— Aza , Aviva, and Aenea, with honorary surrogate siblings R. Fureigh and Jenna Mandis. In 1985, Raskin described his house as "practically one large playground", with secret doors and passageways, an auditorium that seats 185, and

1539-564: A single floppy. The System 8810 was functionally identical to the 8813, but in a smaller chassis, with 5 slots and only one minifloppy drive. The 88/MS (Mass Storage) was a cabinet housing dual, 8-inch (full size) floppy drives. It was available with either single- or double-sided disk drives, both using double-density recording on hard-sectored media. The 88/MS could be added onto either an 8813 or 8810 system. The largest Poly configurations would contain three mini-floppy drives and four full-size drives, with drive numbers from 1 to 7. The 88/HD

1620-402: A specific design or situation. Striking a functional balance among the principles is critical for an effective design. 1.Make displays legible (or audible) . A display's legibility is critical and necessary for designing a usable display. If the characters or objects being displayed cannot be discernible, the operator cannot effectively use them. 2.Avoid absolute judgment limits . Do not ask

1701-404: A steady input and discussion between clients, creators, and specialists and push for specialized frameworks to be folded with the sorts of encounters clients need to have, as opposed to wrapping user experience around a finished framework. Displays are human-made artifacts designed to support the perception of relevant system variables and facilitate further processing of that information. Before

SECTION 20

#1732773073958

1782-507: A version of the Pascal programming language ) to it, which Apple later licensed and shipped as Apple Pascal . Through this time, Raskin continually wrote memos about how the personal computer could become a true consumer appliance. While the Apple III was under development in 1978 and '79, Raskin was lobbying for Apple to create a radically different kind of computer that was designed from

1863-1010: Is an associated cost in time or effort. A display design should minimize this cost by allowing frequently accessed sources to be located at the nearest possible position. However, adequate legibility should not be sacrificed to reduce this cost. 9. Proximity compatibility principle . Divided attention between two information sources may be necessary for the completion of one task. These sources must be mentally integrated and are defined to have close mental proximity. Information access costs should be low, which can be achieved in many ways (e.g., proximity, linkage by common colors, patterns, shapes, etc.). However, close display proximity can be harmful by causing too much clutter. 10. Principle of multiple resources . A user can more easily process information across different resources. For example, visual and auditory information can be presented simultaneously rather than presenting all visual or all auditory information. 11. Replace memory with visual information: knowledge in

1944-408: Is concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them". A key aspect of HCI is user satisfaction, also referred to as End-User Computing Satisfaction. It goes on to say: "Because human–computer interaction studies a human and a machine in communication, it draws from supporting knowledge on both

2025-410: Is crucial to theoretical considerations in the field. Humans interact with computers in many ways, and the interface between the two is crucial to facilitating this interaction. HCI is also sometimes termed human–machine interaction (HMI), man-machine interaction (MMI) or computer-human interaction (CHI). Desktop applications, internet browsers, handheld computers, and computer kiosks make use of

2106-869: Is increasingly debated. Much of the research in the field of human–computer interaction takes an interest in: Visions of what researchers in the field seek to achieve might vary. When pursuing a cognitivist perspective, researchers of HCI may seek to align computer interfaces with the mental model that humans have of their activities. When pursuing a post-cognitivist perspective, researchers of HCI may seek to align computer interfaces with existing social practices or existing sociocultural values. Researchers in HCI are interested in developing design methodologies, experimenting with devices, prototyping software, and hardware systems, exploring interaction paradigms, and developing models and theories of interaction. The following experimental design principles are considered, when evaluating

2187-415: Is more similar to A423B8 than 92 is to 93. Unnecessarily similar features should be removed, and dissimilar features should be highlighted. 6. Principle of pictorial realism . A display should look like the variable that it represents (e.g., the high temperature on a thermometer shown as a higher vertical level). If there are multiple elements, they can be configured in a manner that looks like they would in

2268-422: Is quite broad in scope. It is attended by academics, practitioners, and industry people, with company sponsors such as Google, Microsoft, and PayPal. There are also dozens of other smaller, regional, or specialized HCI-related conferences held around the world each year, including: PolyMorphic Systems#System 8813 PolyMorphic Systems was a manufacturer of microcomputer boards and systems based on

2349-607: Is understood correctly. 4.Redundancy gain . If a signal is presented more than once, it is more likely to be understood correctly. This can be done by presenting the signal in alternative physical forms (e.g., color and shape, voice and print, etc.), as redundancy does not imply repetition. A traffic light is a good example of redundancy, as color and position are redundant. 5.Similarity causes confusion: Use distinguishable elements . Signals that appear to be similar will likely be confused. The ratio of similar features to different features causes signals to be similar. For example, A423B9

2430-513: The Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080 . The first was an A/D and D/A converter board. This was followed by a video terminal interface (VTI) card which became the primary display device for their systems. Later board-level products included CPU , RAM , and disk controller cards. With the release of their CPU card, PolyMorphic began selling complete systems. Their first was the Poly-88, housed in

2511-603: The Macintosh project in 1979 to implement some of these ideas. He later hired his former student Bill Atkinson from UCSD to Apple, along with Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith from the Apple Service Department, which was located in the same building as the Publications Department. Secretly bypassing Jobs's ego and authority by continually securing permission and funding directly at the executive level, Raskin created and solely supervised

Jef Raskin - Misplaced Pages Continue

2592-641: The S-100 bus . Their products included the Poly-88 and the System 8813. The company was incorporated in California in 1976 as Interactive Products Corporation d/b/a PolyMorphic Systems. It was initially based in Goleta , then Santa Barbara, California . PolyMorphic Systems' first products were several interface boards based on the then-popular S-100 bus . These were compatible with other microcomputers such as

2673-583: The Xerox PARC -inspired GUI -based Lisa design to Raskin's appliance-computing, "computers-by-the-millions" concept. Steve Wozniak , who around then had been co-leading the Macintosh team with Raskin, was on hiatus from the company following a traumatic airplane accident, allowing Jobs to take managerial lead over the project. Raskin is credited as one of the first to introduce Jobs and the Lisa engineers to

2754-642: The Altair, the name was changed. The Poly-88 board set consisted of the following: The Poly-88 ROM contained a boot loader program, capable of reading programs from the cassette tape interface. Available programs included games, utilities, a BASIC interpreter , and an 8080 assembler . PolyMorphic's disk-based system was the System 8813. It consisted of a larger chassis holding one, two, or three 5 1 ⁄ 4 -inch minifloppy disk drives from Shugart Associates . The drives used single-sided, single-density storage on hard-sectored diskettes. Storage capacity

2835-421: The Macintosh project for approximately its first year. This included selecting the name of his favorite apple, writing the mission document The Book of Macintosh , securing office space, and recruiting and managing the original staff. Author Steven Levy said, "It was Raskin who provided the powerful vision of a computer whose legacy would be low cost, high utility, and a groundbreaking friendliness." The prototype

2916-584: The PARC concepts, though he ultimately dismissed PARC's technology and opposed the use of the mouse. Raskin claimed to have had continued direct input into the eventual Mac design, including the decision to use a one-button mouse as part of the Apple interface, instead of PARC's 3-button mouse. Others, including Larry Tesler , acknowledge his advocacy for a one-button mouse but say that it was a decision reached simultaneously by others at Apple who had stronger authority on

2997-571: The RAM cards allowed the CPU to keep two applications in memory simultaneously. However, the TTL-level keyboard interface limited the distance between the two user stations to a few feet. The dominant operating system for microcomputers in this era was CP/M . Unmodified Poly systems were unable to run CP/M, for several reasons: Late in the system's lifetime, hardware modifications were introduced to solve

3078-578: The Swyft. Raskin wrote a book, The Humane Interface (2000), in which he developed his ideas about human-computer interfaces. Raskin was a long-time member of BAYCHI, the Bay-Area Computer-Human Interface group, a professional organization for human-interface designers. He presented papers on his own work, reviewed the human interfaces of various consumer products (such as a BMW car he'd been asked to review), and discussed

3159-587: The SwyftCard, a firmware card for the Apple II containing an integrated application suite, also released on a disk as SwyftWare. Information Appliance later developed the Swyft as a stand-alone laptop computer. Raskin licensed this design to Canon , which shipped a similar desktop product as the Canon Cat . Released in 1987, the unit had an innovative interface that attracted much interest but it did not become

3240-572: The company, because there was such an antiacademic bias in the early Apple days." From his responsibility for documentation and testing, Raskin had great influence on early engineering projects. Because the Apple II only displayed uppercase characters on a 40-column screen, his department used the PolyMorphic Systems 8813 (an Intel-8080-based machine running a proprietary operating system called Exec) to write documentation; this spurred

3321-440: The completed TV advertisement at launch, only allowed the Cat to be sold by its typewriter sales people, and prevented Raskin from selling the Cat directly with a TV demonstration of how easy it was to use. Shortly thereafter, the stock market crash of 1987 so panicked Information Appliance's venture capitalists that they drained millions of dollars from the company, depriving it of the capital needed to be able to manufacture and sell

Jef Raskin - Misplaced Pages Continue

3402-456: The data obtained from affect-detection channels to improve decision models. A brain–computer interface (BCI), is a direct communication pathway between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device. BCI differs from neuromodulation in that it allows for bidirectional information flow. BCIs are often directed at researching, mapping, assisting, augmenting, or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. Security interactions are

3483-493: The debut of their Apple II personal computer at the first West Coast Computer Faire . Jobs hired Raskin's company Bannister and Crun to write the Apple II BASIC Programming Manual. Raskin said "I was talking fifty dollars a page. They talked fifty dollars for the whole manual." Upon the Apple II unit with the serial number of "2", he reportedly wrote "a literate manual that became a standard for

3564-477: The development of an 80-column display card and a suitable text editor for the Apple II. His experiences testing Applesoft BASIC inspired him to design a competing product, called Notzo BASIC, which was never implemented. When Wozniak developed the first disk drives for the Apple II, Raskin went back to his contacts at UCSD and encouraged them to port the UCSD P-System operating system (incorporating

3645-417: The drive letter convention ( A: ) used by CP/M and later MS-DOS . File names were case-sensitive and could contain up to 31 characters including a two-character extension. For example, a text file might be named Notes.TX . Various file extensions had predefined meanings: .GO for executable files , .BS for BASIC programs, .OV for overlays. Overlays were used extensively to provide more code space for

3726-440: The effectiveness of human–computer interaction. The influence of emotions in human–computer interaction has been studied in fields such as financial decision-making using ECG and organizational knowledge sharing using eye-tracking and face readers as affect-detection channels. In these fields, it has been shown that affect-detection channels have the potential to detect human emotions and those information systems can incorporate

3807-514: The following : Social computing is an interactive and collaborative behavior considered between technology and people. In recent years, there has been an explosion of social science research focusing on interactions as the unit of analysis, as there are a lot of social computing technologies that include blogs, emails, social networking, quick messaging, and various others. Much of this research draws from psychology, social psychology, and sociology. For example, one study found out that people expected

3888-444: The following are common reasons: Traditionally, computer use was modeled as a human–computer dyad in which the two were connected by a narrow explicit communication channel, such as text-based terminals. Much work has been done to make the interaction between a computing system and a human more reflective of the multidimensional nature of everyday communication. Because of potential issues, human–computer interaction shifted focus beyond

3969-431: The interface to respond to observations as articulated by D. Engelbart: "If ease of use were the only valid criterion, people would stick to tricycles and never try bicycles." How humans interact with computers continues to evolve rapidly. Human–computer interaction is affected by developments in computing. These forces include: As of 2010 the future for HCI is expected to include the following characteristics: One of

4050-611: The issue. Raskin later stated that were he to redesign the mouse, it would have three clearly labeled buttons—two buttons on top marked "Select" and "Activate", and a "Grab" button on the side that could be used by squeezing the mouse. It has the three described buttons (two invisible), but they are assigned to different functions than Raskin specified for his own interface and can be customized. In 2005, Macintosh project member Andy Hertzfeld remembered Raskin's reputation for often inaccurately claiming to have invented various technologies. Raskin's resume from 2002 lends credence by stating he

4131-519: The language utilized "typing amplification" in which only the first letter is typed and the computer provides the balance of the instruction eliminating typing errors. It was also the basis for programming classes taught by Raskin and Collins in the UCSD Visual Arts Department. Raskin curated several art shows including one featuring his collection of unusual toys, and presenting toys as works of art. During this period, he changed

SECTION 50

#1732773073958

4212-488: The machine and the human side. On the machine side, techniques in computer graphics , operating systems , programming languages , and development environments are relevant. On the human side, communication theory , graphic and industrial design disciplines, linguistics , social sciences , cognitive psychology , social psychology , and human factors such as computer user satisfaction are relevant. And, of course, engineering and design methods are relevant." Due to

4293-479: The main conferences for new research in human–computer interaction is the annually held Association for Computing Machinery 's (ACM) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , usually referred to by its short name CHI (pronounced kai , or Khai ). CHI is organized by ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction ( SIGCHI ). CHI is a large conference, with thousands of attendants, and

4374-616: The mind". According to Raskin Center, "Cognetics brings interface design out of the mystic realm of guruism, transforming it into an engineering discipline with a rigorous theoretical framework." The term cognetics had earlier been coined and trademarked by Charles Kreitzberg in 1982 when he started Cognetics Corporation , one of the first user experience design companies. It is also used to describe educational programs intended to foster thinking skills in grades 3-12 (US) and for Cognetics, Inc., an economic research firm founded by David L. Birch ,

4455-622: The multidisciplinary nature of HCI, people with different backgrounds contribute to its success. Poorly designed human-machine interfaces can lead to many unexpected problems. A classic example is the Three Mile Island accident , a nuclear meltdown accident, where investigations concluded that the design of the human-machine interface was at least partly responsible for the disaster. Similarly, accidents in aviation have resulted from manufacturers' decisions to use non-standard flight instruments or throttle quadrant layouts: even though

4536-503: The new designs were proposed to be superior in basic human-machine interaction, pilots had already ingrained the "standard" layout. Thus, the conceptually good idea had unintended results. The human–computer interface can be described as the point of communication between the human user and the computer. The flow of information between the human and computer is defined as the loop of interaction . The loop of interaction has several aspects to it, including: Human–computer interaction studies

4617-548: The operating system. If a file named INITIAL.TX was present when the system booted, commands listed in that file were executed automatically, similar to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file of an MS-DOS system. Later versions of Exec supported subdirectories . The naming syntax continued to use angle brackets. For example, a file in a second-level subdirectory on drive 2 might be named <2<Projects<Dan<Accounts.TX . Unlike MS-DOS and Unix , no explicit "make directory" command

4698-409: The prevalent graphical user interfaces (GUI) of today. Voice user interfaces (VUI) are used for speech recognition and synthesizing systems, and the emerging multi-modal and Graphical user interfaces (GUI) allow humans to engage with embodied character agents in a way that cannot be achieved with other interface paradigms. The growth in human–computer interaction field has led to an increase in

4779-432: The quality of interaction, and resulted in many new areas of research beyond. Instead of designing regular interfaces, the different research branches focus on the concepts of multimodality over unimodality, intelligent adaptive interfaces over command/action based ones, and active interfaces over passive interfaces. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) defines human–computer interaction as "a discipline that

4860-466: The represented environment. 7. Principle of the moving part . Moving elements should move in a pattern and direction compatible with the user's mental model of how it actually moves in the system. For example, the moving element on an altimeter should move upward with increasing altitude. 8. Minimizing information access cost or interaction cost . When the user's attention is diverted from one location to another to access necessary information, there

4941-400: The semantic ambiguities between the two parties. In the interaction of humans and computers, research has studied how computers can detect, process, and react to human emotions to develop emotionally intelligent information systems. Researchers have suggested several 'affect-detection channels'. The potential of telling human emotions in an automated and digital fashion lies in improvements to

SECTION 60

#1732773073958

5022-452: The slogan on the Macintosh group's easel, "It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy." Apple acknowledged Raskin's role after he had left the company by gifting him the millionth Macintosh computer, with an engraved brass plaque on the front. Raskin left Apple in 1982 and formed Information Appliance, Inc. to implement the concepts of his original Macintosh concept. The first product is

5103-500: The spelling of his name from "Jeff" to "Jef" after having met Jon Collins and liking the lack of extraneous letters. Raskin occasionally wrote for computer publications, such as Dr. Dobb's Journal . He formed a company named Bannister and Crun, which was named for two characters playing in the BBC radio comedy The Goon Show . Raskin first met Apple Computer co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage workshop following

5184-467: The start to be easy to use. In Computers by the Millions , he stated that expandable computers like the Apple II were too complex, and development was difficult due to the unknown nature of the machine the program ran on. The machine he envisioned was very different from the Macintosh that was eventually released and had much more in common with PDAs than modern desktop -based machines. Raskin started

5265-534: The study of interaction between humans and computers specifically as it pertains to information security . Its aim, in plain terms, is to improve the usability of security features in end user applications. Unlike HCI, which has roots in the early days of Xerox PARC during the 1970s, HCISec is a nascent field of study by comparison. Interest in this topic tracks with that of Internet security , which has become an area of broad public concern only in very recent years. When security features exhibit poor usability,

5346-540: The user simply started typing text it switched into editor mode, and if numbers are typed it switched to calculator mode. In many cases these switches were largely invisible to the user. It was clear that Macintosh was the most interesting thing at Apple—and Steve Jobs took it over. Jef Raskin In 1981, after the Lisa team had "kicked him out", Steve Jobs 's attention drew toward Raskin's Macintosh project, intending to combine

5427-433: The user to determine the level of a variable based on a single sensory variable (e.g., color, size, loudness). These sensory variables can contain many possible levels. 3.Top-down processing . Signals are likely perceived and interpreted by what is expected based on a user's experience. If a signal is presented contrary to the user's expectation, more physical evidence of that signal may need to be presented to assure that it

5508-425: The ways in which humans make—or do not make—use of computational artifacts, systems, and infrastructures. Much of the research in this field seeks to improve the human–computer interaction by improving the usability of computer interfaces. How usability is to be precisely understood, how it relates to other social and cultural values, and when it is, and when it may not be a desirable property of computer interfaces

5589-405: The work of his colleagues in various companies and universities. At the start of the new millennium, Raskin undertook the building of a new computer interface based on his 30 years of work and research, called The Humane Environment, THE. On January 1, 2005, he renamed it Archy . It is a system incarnating his concepts of the humane interface, by using open source elements within his rendition of

5670-425: The world . A user should not need to retain important information solely in working memory or retrieve it from long-term memory. A menu, checklist, or another display can aid the user by easing the use of their memory. However, memory use may sometimes benefit the user by eliminating the need to reference some knowledge globally (e.g., an expert computer operator would rather use direct commands from memory than refer to

5751-459: The young industry". In January 1978, Raskin joined Apple as Manager of Publications, the company's 31st employee. For some time he continued as Director of Publications and New Product Review, and also worked on packaging and other issues. He had concealed his degree in computer science, out of concern for cultural bias against academia among the hobby-driven personal computer industry. He explained, "If they had known ... they might not have let me in

5832-540: Was "Creator of Macintosh computer at Apple Computer, Inc." Raskin conceived and solely supervised the Macintosh project for approximately its first year; however, Hertzfeld describes Raskin's relationship to the drastically different finished Mac product more like that of an "eccentric great uncle" than its father. In Jobs's "Lost Interview" from 1996, he refers to the Macintosh as a product of team effort while acknowledging Raskin's early role. Jobs reportedly co-opted some of Raskin's leadership philosophies, such as when he wrote

5913-495: Was a subsystem with an 18 MB SASI hard drive, housed in an 8810 chassis. Software called Volume Manager partitioned the available space into several logical disk drives, similar to the FDISK partitioning command used by other operating systems. The TwinSystem was marketed as "Get more work done on a computer built for two." The System 8813 TwinSystem had an additional RAM card, video card, and keyboard. Bank switching between

5994-431: Was an accomplished archer , target shooter, bicycle racer and an occasional model race car driver. He was a musician and composer, publishing a series of collected recorder studies using the pseudonym of Aabel Aabius. In his later years he also wrote freelance articles for Macintosh magazines, such as Mac Home Journal , and many modeling magazines, Forbes , Wired , and computing journals. One of his favorite pastimes

6075-526: Was approximately 90K bytes per diskette. System 8813 hardware included the standard CPU and VTI cards; a RAM card, typically with at least 32K of memory; and a disk controller card, to interface with the minifloppy drives. Later, a Z80 based disk controller supported double sided, double-density minifloppy drives, and full-size (8-inch) floppy drives. The Poly disk operating system was called Exec . The three disk drives were distinguished by numbers enclosed in angle brackets such as <1> , rather than

6156-460: Was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to establish a Computer and Humanities center which used several 16-bit Data General Nova computers and CRTs rather than the teletypes which were more common. Along with his undergraduate student Jonathan (Jon) Collins, Raskin developed the FLOW programming language for use in teaching programming to the art and humanities students. The language

6237-602: Was first used at the Humanities Summer Training Institute held in 1970 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas . The language has only seven statements ( COMMENT , GET IT , PRINT IT , PRINT "text" , JUMP TO , IF IT IS " " JUMP TO , and STOP ) and can not manipulate numbers. The language was first implemented in Fortran by Collins in under a week. Later versions of

6318-399: Was needed. When a program tried to create a file within a subdirectory, that subdirectory would be automatically created (if it didn't already exist). System 8813 software included an 8080 macro assembler and a BASIC interpreter for program development. Poly BASIC used BCD arithmetic for high precision in financial applications. A word-processing system, named WordMaster, consisted of

6399-483: Was popularized by Stuart K. Card , Allen Newell , and Thomas P. Moran in their 1983 book, The Psychology of Human–Computer Interaction. The first known use was in 1975 by Carlisle. The term is intended to convey that, unlike other tools with specific and limited uses, computers have many uses which often involve an open-ended dialogue between the user and the computer. The notion of dialogue likens human–computer interaction to human-to-human interaction: an analogy that

6480-468: Was similar in power to the Apple II and included a small 9-inch (230 mm) black-and-white character display and floppy drive, in a small case. It was text only, as Raskin disliked the computer mouse or anything else that could take his hands from the keyboard. Several basic applications were built into the machine, selectable by pressing function keys. The machine included logic to understand user intentions and switch programs dynamically. For instance, if

6561-399: Was to play music with his children. He accompanied them on the piano while they played or sang while going through old fake-books passed down from his father. They routinely improvised together. Raskin owned Jef's Friends, a small company which made model airplane kits. He was a toy designer. He designed Space Expander, a hanging cloth maze for a person to walk through. He designed Bloxes,

#957042