alt Hacker Newshttps://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html:
“There's no doubt that Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, and that his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy to use, low cost, high volume appliance computer got the ball rolling, and remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then hiring amazing individuals like Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman and Brian Howard for the Macintosh team. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Macintosh that we know and love is very different than the computer that Jef wanted to build, so much so that he is much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh's father.
Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle), there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.”
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That was my exact thought when I read the submission’s title. Thank you for finding and posting the article.
This interview does seem to have a comment about it:
> Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.
In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct:
JR: No. I designed it to be graphical from the ground up. But the text portions of the interface, which I also cared about, would have been cleaner. People have put together my dislike of the mouse (confusing dislike for a particular input device with dislike for graphic input devices in general; I personally prefer trackballs and tablets) and my careful attention to text handling to a false legend of my wanting a text-based machine. Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.