“Jef Raskin wasn’t the typical tech industry power broker. He was never a celebrity CEO, never a Midas-touch venture capitalist, and never conspicuously wealthy (although he was wealthy). Yet until his Feb. 26 death at 61, the creator of the Macintosh led the rallying cry for easy-to-use computers, leaving an indelible mark on Silicon Valley and helping to revolutionize the computer industry,” Sarah Lacy writes in her commentary, “Jef Raskin: He Thought Different” for BusinessWeek.
“The tech world won’t know the final impact of Raskin’s work until several more months, perhaps years. At the time of his death, he was working on what he hoped would be his biggest mark yet: a new type of operating system called Archy. Friends and co-workers describe it as his longtime vision of easy-to-use computing brought to life,” Lacy writes. “Last December, funding from an unnamed international company came through at almost the same time his pancreatic cancer was discovered, and Raskin threw himself into completing the framework of the system in his final months, says David Burstein, who’s making a film about Raskin’s life and did dozens of interviews with him late last year and early this year.”
Full article here.
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The man who named Apple’s Macintosh, GUI pioneer Jef Raskin dies at 61 – February 27, 2005