A while back, Ars Technica published a thoughtful piece about Jef Raskin, tracing his long pursuit of the “humane computer” and the cul-de-sacs where that pursuit ended. It’s a generous, well-told account of the designer who wanted to make machines simpler, kinder, and more aligned with the way people actually think.
But part of what makes Raskin interesting is that his story isn’t just Apple’s story. He came out of the same cultural current John Markoff chronicled in What the Dormouse Said—the Bay Area tradition that treated computers not as office appliances but as tools for thought, instruments of liberation. Read that way, the Canon Cat and Raskin’s other projects aren’t just an eccentric side quest from a frustrated Apple veteran. It’s evidence of how far the humane ideal could stretch, and how quickly it ran up against the limits of commercial computing.
Apple couldn’t deliver Raskin’s vision then, and it can’t deliver it now. Neither can any other big platform company. If we want to understand why, and what Raskin still tells us about humane computing, we have to put him back in the longer lineage he belonged to, and look at how his version of the dream carried that vision but also narrowed it.
Prophets and participants
What the Dormouse Said documents how the Bay Area counterculture shaped early personal computing. LSD, communes, systems theory, amorphous defense research contracts, and Engelbart’s “augmentation” experiments all swirled together in a weird scene that accidentally (or maybe not so accidentally) created much of the modern world.
The story usually gets told with a neat list: Engelbart’s demo, Nelson’s Xanadu hypertext, Kay’s Dynabook, Brand’s Whole Earth. Xerox PARC, Steve Jobs, the World Wide Web. The familiar pantheon. But that version turns a messy, improvisational moment into a plaque. Engelbart’s system needed a whole research staff just to operate; Nelson’s Xanadu was (and is) more sermon than software; Kay’s Dynabook lived mostly on paper; Brand mostly supplied vocabulary and vibe. What bound them together wasn’t working code so much as the conviction that computers could be more than appliances and calculators, even if no one agreed on what “more” meant.
Ultimately all these weird white guys had a futurist vision: computers could be liberation machines. They weren’t just for business automation or scientific number-crunching; they could be deployed to expand consciousness and reshape how people thought and worked.
Raskin belonged to this current. Before Apple, he was an artist and a musician. He brought a humanist’s suspicion of machine logic into the design lab. He argued for humane interfaces: modeless, predictable, low-friction, focused on the human first. He wasn’t a prophet on his own crying in the wilderness so much as another strand of the same weave.
That said, his role was different than that of some of these other figures. He tried to pull those ideals out of the lab and into machines ordinary people might actually use. The Macintosh began under his hand, though what shipped was less a tool for thought than a polished derivative—what you might call a “popular religion” of computing, stripped of the harder doctrines.
The Canon Cat and its predecessors were Raskin’s counterargument: humane, text-first systems that tried to carry the spirit of the Dormouse tradition into the commercial world without sanding off everything that made it strange. It sort of worked, but only sort of.
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