#Jef raskin how to
#Jef raskin mac

Still, I procrastinated until last weekend, when I took the box out of the basement, showed it to my kids, and started building it.įor a person who is used to working with software, building the Wingo is a completely different experience. I wasn’t sure if that would matter or not, but I realized that it was time to either build the kit or throw it out. Instead I was putting in long hours in a research lab at MIT and then Harvard.Ī few months ago I was in the basement and noticed that the Wingo box had been water-damaged.

I wanted to learn to fly the plane and then take it out with my kids. He taught his oldest son enough about aeronautics that his son designed a new wing. They all played musical instruments together. Every time I saw it I felt guilty that I was spending so much time working hard, not spending as much time with my children. Apparently the onset had been sudden, and the cancer had been very aggressive.Īfter I heard about Raskin’s death in 2005, the Wingo box in the basement started haunting me–but in a good kind of way. I was at a conference in Dominic when I heard on the radio that Raskin had died of cancer–I hadn’t even known that he was sick. When the Wingo showed up in its box, I was hard at work on another project, so the Wingo went into the basement. Of course, there are a lot of steps between buying a kit plane and flying an aircraft.

#Jef raskin how to

I told him I would buy one, build it, and come back when I knew how to fly one of those little planes. The ideal beginner’s plane was the Wingo from Hobby Lobby, he said. He told me that I should buy my own craft and crash it a few times before I tried my hand at one of his. It was too sensitive, he told me, for a first-time flyer. We spent the next two hours talking while he piloted the craft. He took a glider out of his trunk, took out the RC controller, and then threw the glider in the air. It was typical California: a road, a few parking spaces, and a cliff. Sometime in the spring of 2002 Raskin took me out to a park that was a mile or so from his house. Raskin told me that flying an RC aircraft was harder than flying in the cockpit. Once you learn to fly, though, it’s something you never forget. I learned to fly in high school but stopped after a near-death experience between my second and third years of college. As I looked at them, I realized that something seemed odd: none of them had any propellers. Although there were a few computers and laptops, the most prominent objects in the office were the aircraft. Go down the stairs and into one of the rooms and there was a hidden door in the wall that led to Raskin’s office. The hallways were lined with bookshelves. It was a large two-level house built into the side of a hill, with the kitchen, living room, and other formal rooms upstairs and the bedrooms down below. He invited me over I ended up visiting his house a bunch of times over the following years. He especially loved building and flying radio-controlled aircraft, which he did at his house in Pacifica. It turned out that Raskin was a designer of all kinds of things, not just computers and software. I said that I had been one of the coeditors of The Unix Hater’s Handbook a few years before and, as a result, agreed whole-heartedly. Alas, he acknowledged that Apple probably didn’t have much of an alternative at that point.

#Jef raskin mac

Raskin thought that putting Unix underneath the Mac was precisely the wrong thing to do, if your professed goal was creating a computer that is easy to use. We started talking about computers, and about Apple’s then-recent decision to purchase NeXT Computer. Like me, Raskin wrote for the magazine from time to time. I met Raskin in the 1990s at a party that Wired magazine threw to celebrate moving into its new offices. The foam plane has a wingspan of 43.25 inches and weighs 20 ounces. Plane parts: The Wingo, partially assembled. The Macintosh team had given it to Raskin in recognition that it was his creative vision that had brought the Mac into existence. But inside Raskin’s home office was the millionth Macintosh to come off Apple’s production line. These days practically nobody remembers the Canon Cat, tens of millions of people use Macs, and Steve Jobs is typically given most of the credit. But then Raskin left Apple in 1982–many people say he was thrown out–and started a new company that created another breakthrough computer called the Canon Cat. In 1979 Raskin hired his former student Bill Atkinson to work on what was to become the Macintosh Project. He started at Apple in January 1978 writing documentation for the Apple II, after a brief stint teaching computer science at the University of California, San Diego. Jef Raskin is largely remembered as the father of the Macintosh.