I love, love, love flipping through old magazines. Look, an ad for a commercial Emacs! A C compiler for just $495! A port of vi to MS-DOS for $149! A sort command for just $135! A PC card with a 68000 coprocessor for heaven knows why!
The good old days were fun for their sense of everything-is-new adventure, but there's an awful lot I don't miss.
I subscribe to Microcenter's emails and the one with the miscellaneous lesser priced accessories always completely loads in Gmail and it gives me a little bit of that feeling of flipping through an old computer shopper. I think those are all being scanned too and uploaded to the archive I think https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-may-1996-images...
For the young'uns among us, imaging that you didn't have access to the Internet, but you still needed to research and build a PC from parts. Now imagine someone mails you a 896 page (!!!) magazine describing basically every part you could ever actually need or want, along with a gazillion vendors for each.
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:
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Emacs and a couple of key plugins can get you pretty darned close to the Cat interface. But here's the thing, Emacs is still behind the Open Genera interface which I believe, predates the Cat. And the extensability of the Lisp Machine/Emacs is superior to that of the Cat.
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.
When I was in my late teens, right about the time this article came out, I was an ignorant, naive, first-time computer user. My college had some Canon Cats in the computer lab. I didn't know the first thing about computers, and I didn't understand the difference between the PCs and Macs in the rest of the lab and the Canon Cats. There was never a line to use a Canon Cat, so I tried it. By Raskin's standards, I should have been the perfect Cat user. Being completely ignorant, I had no preconceived ideas about how a computer should operate. I found the Cat utterly incomprehensible. Then someone demonstrated a Macintosh to me, and I immediately understood it. Take that anecdote as you will.
I'm curious if the manual was made available to you. The reason I ask is that in the linked article he said the manual was part of the user interface. Also, from what I recall, his opinion on intuitive was that it was more important that it worked well after learning how to use it, vs somehow knowing it without being taught. (I'll double check my copy of The Humane Interface when I get back to it.)
edit: back, here's a quote:
> [...] I asked people unfamiliar with the mouse to use a Macintosh. My protocol was to run a [game that only used clicking, with the keyboard removed]. I would point to the mouse and say, "This is the mouse that you use to operate the game. Go ahead, give it a try." If asked any questions, I'd say something nonspecific, such as "Try it." The reaction of an intelligent Finnish educator who had never seen a Macintosh but was otherwise computer literate was typical: she picked up the mouse.
> Nowadays, the might seem absurd, but [mentions the scene in Star Trek where Scotty does the same thing]. In the case of my Finnish subject, her next move was to turn the mouse over and to try rolling the ball. Nothing happened. She shook the mouse, and then she held the mouse in one hand and clicked the button with the other. No effect. Eventually, she succeeded in operating the game by holding the mouse in her right hand, rolling the ball on the bottom with her fingers, and clicking the button with her left hand.
> These experiments make the point that an interface's ease of use and speed of learning are not connected with the imagined properties of intuitiveness and naturalness. The mouse is very easy to learn: All I had to do, with any of the test subjects, was to put the mouse on the desk, move it, and click on something. In five to ten seconds, they learned how to use the mouse. That's fast and easy, but it is neither intuitive nor natural. No artifact is.
> The belief that interfaces can be intuitive and natural is often detrimental to improved interface design. As a consultant, I am frequently asked to design a "better" interface to a product. Usually, an interface can be designed such that, in terms of learning time, eventual speed of operation (productivity), decreased error rates, and easy of implementation, it is superior to both the client's existing products and completing products. Nonetheless, even when my proposals are seen as significant improvements, they are often rejected on the grounds that they are not intuitive. [He goes on to talk about how if it going to be significantly better than it will end up being different than what people currently know, but the clients still want it to be similar to Windows...]
The Humane Interface section 6-1
Having refreshed myself on what he said, and re-reading what you wrote, I don't think he would say that you should be able to walk up to his computer without having someone show you how to use it, or looking at a manual. And as you said: "Then someone demonstrated a Macintosh to me" just like when he said he'd show people how to use the mouse.
I'm currently working on making a custom keyboard with the leap keys below the space bar like he made for the Canon Cat, and planning on using it with either a microcontroller or 65c02 (edit: or a single board computer) and building up the software in Forth, so this was a really fun article to run across.
I love, love, love flipping through old magazines. Look, an ad for a commercial Emacs! A C compiler for just $495! A port of vi to MS-DOS for $149! A sort command for just $135! A PC card with a 68000 coprocessor for heaven knows why!
The good old days were fun for their sense of everything-is-new adventure, but there's an awful lot I don't miss.
You don't miss being able to make a living from writing your own software?
That part sounds pretty wonderful, but it also means you were paying through the teeth for everyone else’s software, too.
There are still plenty of small shops making a nice software living today. I don’t have the nerve to do it myself, though.
Remember that these are 1986s dollars, worth nearly $3 today.
"Borland introduces Turbo Prolog, the natural language of Artificial Intelligence" just $99.95!
I subscribe to Microcenter's emails and the one with the miscellaneous lesser priced accessories always completely loads in Gmail and it gives me a little bit of that feeling of flipping through an old computer shopper. I think those are all being scanned too and uploaded to the archive I think https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-may-1996-images...
For the young'uns among us, imaging that you didn't have access to the Internet, but you still needed to research and build a PC from parts. Now imagine someone mails you a 896 page (!!!) magazine describing basically every part you could ever actually need or want, along with a gazillion vendors for each.
And you got a new version every month.
It was pure magic, I tell you.
2 replies →
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?
"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.
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 ...
12 replies →
> 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.
> 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.
Highly recommended, timeless read!
"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.
Dude is responsible for one-button mouse ...
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.
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.
He was selling a product called swyftcard for Apple II, see https://hackaday.com/2014/04/06/vcf-east-the-swyft-card/
> 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.
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.
Emacs and a couple of key plugins can get you pretty darned close to the Cat interface. But here's the thing, Emacs is still behind the Open Genera interface which I believe, predates the Cat. And the extensability of the Lisp Machine/Emacs is superior to that of the Cat.
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.
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.
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.
When I was in my late teens, right about the time this article came out, I was an ignorant, naive, first-time computer user. My college had some Canon Cats in the computer lab. I didn't know the first thing about computers, and I didn't understand the difference between the PCs and Macs in the rest of the lab and the Canon Cats. There was never a line to use a Canon Cat, so I tried it. By Raskin's standards, I should have been the perfect Cat user. Being completely ignorant, I had no preconceived ideas about how a computer should operate. I found the Cat utterly incomprehensible. Then someone demonstrated a Macintosh to me, and I immediately understood it. Take that anecdote as you will.
I'm curious if the manual was made available to you. The reason I ask is that in the linked article he said the manual was part of the user interface. Also, from what I recall, his opinion on intuitive was that it was more important that it worked well after learning how to use it, vs somehow knowing it without being taught. (I'll double check my copy of The Humane Interface when I get back to it.)
edit: back, here's a quote:
> [...] I asked people unfamiliar with the mouse to use a Macintosh. My protocol was to run a [game that only used clicking, with the keyboard removed]. I would point to the mouse and say, "This is the mouse that you use to operate the game. Go ahead, give it a try." If asked any questions, I'd say something nonspecific, such as "Try it." The reaction of an intelligent Finnish educator who had never seen a Macintosh but was otherwise computer literate was typical: she picked up the mouse.
> Nowadays, the might seem absurd, but [mentions the scene in Star Trek where Scotty does the same thing]. In the case of my Finnish subject, her next move was to turn the mouse over and to try rolling the ball. Nothing happened. She shook the mouse, and then she held the mouse in one hand and clicked the button with the other. No effect. Eventually, she succeeded in operating the game by holding the mouse in her right hand, rolling the ball on the bottom with her fingers, and clicking the button with her left hand.
> These experiments make the point that an interface's ease of use and speed of learning are not connected with the imagined properties of intuitiveness and naturalness. The mouse is very easy to learn: All I had to do, with any of the test subjects, was to put the mouse on the desk, move it, and click on something. In five to ten seconds, they learned how to use the mouse. That's fast and easy, but it is neither intuitive nor natural. No artifact is.
> The belief that interfaces can be intuitive and natural is often detrimental to improved interface design. As a consultant, I am frequently asked to design a "better" interface to a product. Usually, an interface can be designed such that, in terms of learning time, eventual speed of operation (productivity), decreased error rates, and easy of implementation, it is superior to both the client's existing products and completing products. Nonetheless, even when my proposals are seen as significant improvements, they are often rejected on the grounds that they are not intuitive. [He goes on to talk about how if it going to be significantly better than it will end up being different than what people currently know, but the clients still want it to be similar to Windows...]
The Humane Interface section 6-1
Having refreshed myself on what he said, and re-reading what you wrote, I don't think he would say that you should be able to walk up to his computer without having someone show you how to use it, or looking at a manual. And as you said: "Then someone demonstrated a Macintosh to me" just like when he said he'd show people how to use the mouse.
I'm currently working on making a custom keyboard with the leap keys below the space bar like he made for the Canon Cat, and planning on using it with either a microcontroller or 65c02 (edit: or a single board computer) and building up the software in Forth, so this was a really fun article to run across.
The article in a scan of the magazine at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/1986-05-dr-dobbs-journal/page/32...
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.
Cookie popup keeps popping up if I allow only necessary cookies on an article about frustrating interactions with technology. (FF on Android)
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.
Prompt engineering, it seems to me, is about the most obvious way to use a computer: Tell it in plain English what you want.
you are assuming clarity and good faith on the other side of the model providers
"Our name for the wordprocessing program you get with the Macintosh is Macwait. If a little clock ever appears on a computer of mine, I'll shoot it."
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...>
Wow. EGA graphics on the cover. That's not something I've heard about in a while...
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
Yeah, she really likes her EGA palette. That's cool.