Jef Raskin, the lead designer of the first Macintosh computer and a
pioneer in the development of user interfaces, died Saturday at age 61.
He had been diagnosed recently with pancreatic cancer, his family says
in a statement.
Raskin joined Apple Computer in 1978 as employee number 31 and headed the company's Macintosh development team
from its inception until 1982. He named the project after his favorite
type of apple, changing the spelling for copyright reasons.
He is credited with significantly advancing the
design of user interfaces, which in the early 1980s were largely
text-based and required users to memorize complex commands. Raskin
convinced his peers at Apple that to reach a wider audience, the
Macintosh needed an interface that was elegant and easy to use.
"Up to that time, at Apple and most other
manufacturers, the concept was to provide the latest and most powerful
hardware, and let the users and third-party software vendors figure out
how to make it usable," he wrote later on his Web site.
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