(2025-09-12) Jef Raskin's Cul-de-sac And The Quest For The Humane Computer

Cameron Kaiser: Jef Raskin's v and the quest for the humane computer. It's sometimes forgotten that Raskin was the originator of the Macintosh project in 1979

Raskin nevertheless concluded that a complex computer (by the standards of the day) could never exist in quantity, nor be usable by enough people to matter. In his 1979 essay “Computers by the Millions,” he argued against systems like the Apple II and the in-development Apple III that relied on expansion slots and cards for many advanced features.

Instead, he felt that “personal computers will be self-contained, complete, and essentially un-expandable

The original Macintosh was designed as an embodiment of some of these concepts. Apple chairman Mike Markkula had a $500 (around $2,200 in 2025) game machine concept in mind

The interface emphasized text and keyboard: There was no mouse, and the display was character-based instead of graphical.

Raskin was aware of early graphical user interfaces in development, particularly Xerox PARC's, and he had even contributed to early design work on the Lisa, but he believed the mouse was inferior to trackballs and tablets and felt such pointing devices were more appropriate for graphics than text. Instead, function keys allowed the user to select built-in applications

in late 1980 when Jobs was removed from the Lisa project by President Mike Scott, after which Jobs moved to unilaterally take over the Macintosh

Raskin initially believed the change would be positive, as Jobs stated he was only interested in developing the hardware

As Jobs started to take over more and more portions of the project, the two men came into more frequent conflict, and Raskin eventually quit Apple for good in March 1982

After Raskin's departure from Apple, he established Information Appliance, Inc. in Palo Alto to develop his original concept on his own terms

wanted to concentrate more on the user interface and the concept's built-in functionality, reviving the ideas he believed had become lost in the Macintosh's transition. He christened it with a new name: Swyft.

Instead of Pascal or assembly language, Swyft's ROM operating system was primarily written in Forth

Swyft's user interface was also radically different and was based on a “document” metaphor.

Raskin thus conceived of a unified workspace in which everything was stored, accessed through one single interface appearing to the user as a text editor editing one single massive document. (reminds me of Ashton-Tate Framework)

The editor was intelligent and could handle different types of text according to its context, and the user could subdivide the large document workspace into multiple subdocuments

Because everything was kept in one place, when the user saved the system state to a floppy disk, their entire workspace was frozen and stored in its entirety

Since everything was kept together and loaded en masse, there was no need for a filesystem.

While around 60 Swyft prototypes of varying functionality were eventually made, IAI's backers balked at the several million dollars additionally required to launch the product under the company's own name. To increase their chances of a successful return on investment, they demanded a licensee for the design instead that would insulate the small company from the costs of manufacturing and sales. They found it in Japanese manufacturer Canon

possibly because of its unusual interface, Canon unexpectedly put its electronic typewriter division in charge of the project, and the IAI team began work with Canon's engineers to refine the hardware for mass production

IAI investors prevailed upon management to find a way to release some of the Swyft technology early in a less expensive incarnation. This concept eventually turned into an expansion card for the Apple IIe.

The SwyftCard's unified workspace can be subdivided into various “subdocuments,” which appear as hard page breaks with equals signs. Although up to 200 pages were supported, in practice, the available workspace limits you to about 15 or 20, “densely typed.”

SwyftCards didn't sell in massive numbers, but their users loved them, particularly the speed and flexibility the system afforded.

even within the single user interface, there should be no “modes” and no switching between different minor behaviors: the interface ought to follow the same rules as much of the time as possible.

Even if an individual application itself is notionally modeless, Raskin presented the real-world example of Command-N commonly used to open a new document but AOL's client using Command-M for a new E-mail message; the situation “that gives rise to a mode in this example consists of having a particular application active. The problem occurs when users employ the Command-N command habitually,” he wrote.

The Canon Cat’s one and only life

Raskin's next computer preserved many such ideas from the Swyft, but it only did so in spite of the demands of Canon management, who forced multiple changes during development

Raskin wanted to use a Mac-like floppy drive that could automatically detect floppy disk insertion, but Canon required the system to use their own floppy drives, which didn't

Canon management also didn't understand the new machine's design philosophy, treating it as an overgrown word processor (dubbed a “WORK Processor [sic]”) instead of the general-purpose computer Raskin intended, and required its programmability in Forth to be removed. This was unpopular with Raskin's team, so rather than remove it completely, they simply hid it behind an unlikely series of keystrokes and excised it from the manual

Thus was released the Canon Cat, announced in July 1987, for $1,495

The Swyft and SwyftCard's editing paradigm transferred to the Canon Cat nearly exactly.

Similarly, the Cat inherits the same “multiple document interface” as the Swyfts: the workspace can be arbitrarily divided into documents

Although Canon had mandated that the Cat's programmability be suppressed, the IAI team nevertheless maintained the ability to compute expressions, which Canon permitted as an extension of the editor metaphor. Simple arithmetic such as 355/113 could be calculated in place

Computations weren't merely limited to simple figures, though; the Cat also allowed users to store the result of a computation to a variable and reference that variable in other computations. If the variables underlying a particular computation were changed, its result would automatically update.

This capability, along with the Cat's non-proportional font, made it possible to construct simple spreadsheets right in the editor using nothing more than expressions and the TAB key to create rows and columns.

The Cat also maintained an extensive set of help screens built into ROM that the SwyftCard, for capacity reasons, was forced to load from floppy disk.

whatever commercial existence the Cat did have turned out to be brief and unprofitable anyway. It sold badly, blamed in large part on Canon's poor marketing, which positioned it as an expensive dedicated word processor in an era where general-purpose PCs and, yes, Macintoshes were getting cheaper and could do more.

Despite the Cat's demise, Raskin's team at IAI attempted to move forward with a successor machine, a portable laptop that would have reportedly weighed just four pounds. The new laptop, christened the Swyft III, used a ROM-based operating system based on the Cat's but with a newer, more sophisticated “leaping” technology called Hyperleap.

Only two prototypes were ever made before IAI's investors, considering the company risky after the Cat's market failure and little money coming in, finally pulled the plug and caused the company to shut down in 1992. Raskin retained patents on the “leaping” method and the Swyft/Cat's means of saving and restoring from disk, but their subsequent licensees did little with the technology, and the patents in the present day have lapsed.

If you can’t beat ’em, write software

The Cat is probably the best known of Raskin's designs (notwithstanding the Macintosh, for reasons discussed earlier), especially as Raskin never led the development of another computer again. Nevertheless, his interface ideas remained influential, and after IAI's closing, he continued as an author and frequent consultant and reviewer for various consumer products. These observations and others were consolidated into his later book The Humane Interface

Raskin's book also considers alternative means of navigation, pointing out that “natural” and “intuitive” are not necessarily synonyms for “easy to use.”

Besides leaping, Raskin also presents the idea of a zooming user interface (ZUI), allowing the user an easier way to not only reach their goal but also see themselves in relationship to that goal and within the entire workspace.

Raskin was hardly the first to propose the ZUI—Ivan Sutherland developed a primitive ZUI for graphics in his 1962 Sketchpad, along with the Spatial Dataland at MIT and Xerox PARC's Smalltalk with “infinite” desktops—but he recognized its unique abilities to keep a user mentally grounded while navigating large structures that would otherwise become unwieldy. This, he asserts, made it more humane.

To crystallize these concepts, rather than create another new computer, Raskin instead started work on a software package with a team that included his son, Aza, initially called The Humane Environment. THE's HumaneEditorProject was first unveiled to the world on Christmas Eve 2002, though initially only as a SourceForge CVS tree, since it was considered very unfinished. The original early builds of the Humane Editor were open-source and intended to run on classic Mac OS 9

As before, the Humane Editor uses a large central workspace subdivided into individual documents, here separated by backtick characters. Our familiar two-tone cursor is also maintained.

Leaping, here with a trademark, is again front and center in THE.

A full list of commands accepted by the Quasimode was available by typing COMMANDS, which in turn emitted them to the document. These are based on precompiled Python files, which the user could edit or add to, and arbitrary Python expressions and code could also be inserted and run from the document workspace directly.

*THE was a fully functioning editor, albeit incomplete, but nevertheless capable enough to write its own documentation with. Despite that, the intention was never to make something that was just an editor, and this aspiration became more obvious as development progressed. To make the software available on more platforms, development subsequently changed to wxPython in 2004, and later Python and Pygame to handle the screen display. The main development platform switched at the same time to Windows, and a Windows demo version of this release was made, although Mac OS X and Linux could still theoretically run it if you installed the prerequisites.

With the establishment of the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces (RCHI), THE's development continued under a new name, Archy.*

Archy had come a long way from the original Mac THE, finally including the same sort of online help tutorial that the SwyftCard and Cat featured.

As before, the COMMANDS verb gave you a list of commands. While THE's command suite was almost entirely specific to an editor application, Archy's aspirations as a more complete all-purpose environment were evident. In particular, in addition to many of the same commands we saw on the Mac, there were now special Internet-oriented commands like EMAIL and GOOGLE. These commands were now just small documents containing Python embedded in the same workspace—no more separate files you had to corral. You could even change built-in commands, and even LEAP itself.

things like your email were also now subdocuments, and your email server settings were a subdocument, too. While this was never said explicitly, a logical extension of the metaphor would have been to subsume webpage contents as in-place parts of the workspace as well—your history, bookmarks, and even the pages themselves could be subdocuments of their own, restored immediately and ready for access when entering Archy. Each time you exited, the entire workspace was saved out into a versioned file, so you could even go back in time to a recent backup if you blew it.

Archy was the last project Raskin was directly involved in, and to date it remains unfinished. Some work continued on the environment after his death—this final release came out in December 2005, nearly 10 months later—but the project was ultimately abandoned, and many planned innovations, such as a ZUI of its own, were never fully developed beyond a separate proof of concept.

*RCHI closed as well and was succeeded in spirit by the Chicago-based Humanized, co-founded by his son Aza. Humanized reworked ideas from Archy into Enso, which expanded the CAPS LOCK-as-command interface with a variety of verbs such as OPEN (to start applications) and DEFINE (to get the dictionary definition of a word), and the ability to perform direct web searches.

By using a system-wide translucent overlay similar to Archy and THE, the program was intended to minimize the need for switching back and forth between multiple applications to complete a task. In 2008, Enso was made free for download, and Humanized's staff joined Mozilla, where the concept became a Firefox browser extension called Ubiquity extension, in which web-specific command verbs could be written in JavaScript and executed in an opaque pop-up window activated by a hotkey combination. However, the project was placed on “indefinite hiatus” in 2009 and was never revisited, and it no longer works with current versions of the browser.*

Perhaps the most complete example of an operating environment built around a ZUI might be A2, a branch of the ETH-Zürich Oberon System.

In 2002, A2 spun off initially as Active Object System, using an updated dialect called Active Oberon supporting improved scheduling, exception handling, and object-oriented programming with processes and threads able to run within an object's context to make that object “active.” While A2 kept the Oberon System's clickable text metaphor, windows and gadgets can also be zoomed in or out of on an infinitely scrolling desktop, which is best appreciated in action. It is still being developed, and older live CDs are still available. However, the Oberon System has never achieved general market awareness beyond its small niche, and any forks less so, limiting it to a practical curiosity for most users.

But as cul-de-sacs go, you can pick far worse places to get lost in than his, and it might even make it out to the main street someday. Until then, at least, you can always still visit—in an upcoming article, we'll show you how.

Your very own humane interface: Try Jef Raskin’s ideas at home.

with a little work and the magic of emulation, you can have your very own humane interface at home and see for yourself what computing might have been had we traveled a little further down Raskin's UI road.

Perhaps the most straightforward of Raskin's systems to emulate is the Canon Cat.

It is supported by MAME, the well-known multi-system emulator, using ROMs available from the Internet Archive.

Note that the MAME driver for the Canon Cat is presently incomplete; it doesn't support a floppy drive or floppy disk images, and it doesn't support the machine's built-in serial port.

You can also break into the hidden Forth interpreter by typing Enable Forth Language, highlighting it (i.e., immediately press both LEAP keys together) and then evaluating it with USE FRONT-ANSWER (not CALC; usually Control-Backspace in MAME). You'll get a Forth ok prompt

The Internet Archive page has full documentation, and the Cat's manual is easy to follow, but sadly, the MAME driver doesn't yet offer you a way to save your document to disk or upload it somewhere.

A SwyftCard shows you swyftcare

*nowadays, the simplest means of experimenting with a SwyftCard is by using a software implementation developed by Eric Rangell for KansasFest 2021. This version loads the contents of the original 16K EPROM into high auxiliary RAM not used by the SwyftCard firmware and executes it from there. It is effectively a modern equivalent of the SwyftDisk, a software-only version IAI later sold for the Apple IIc that lacks additional expansion slots.

You can download Rangell's software with ready-to-use disk images and media assets from the Internet Archive, with the user manual available separately. It should work in most Apple IIe emulators with at most minor adjustments; here, I tested it with Mariani, a macOS port of AppleWin, and Virtual ][.*

Human beings deserve a Humane Environment

These early builds of the Humane Editor (THE) will run under Classic on any Mac OS X-capable Power Mac or natively in Mac OS 9 and include runnable binaries, the Python and C source code, and the CodeWarrior projects necessary to build them. (Later systems should be able to run them with SheepShaver or QEMU. I recommend installing at least Mac OS 9.0.4, and preferably Mac OS 9.2.2.) They are particularly advantageous in that they are fully self-contained and don't need a separate standalone Python interpreter.

The build we'll demonstrate is the last one available in the SourceForge CVS, modified on September 25, 2003.

Double-click HumaneEnvironment to start the application. Initially, a window will flash open and then close.

In HumaneEnvironment, press Command-N for a new document. Here, we'll create an “untitled” file in the Documents folder. Notice that in this very early version, there were still “files,” and they were still accessed through the regular Macintosh Standard File package.

A full list of commands accepted by the Quasimode are available by typing COMMANDS, which in turn emits them to the document. These are based on Python files, which are precompiled from .hpy sources (“Humane Python”), which you can modify and recompile (using COMPILE) on the fly.

To date, Archy remains unfinished, and the easiest example to run is the final build 124 dated December 15, 2005, available for Windows 98 and up. The build includes its own embedded Python interpreter, libraries, and support files, and as a well-behaved 32-bit application, will run on pretty much any modern Windows PC. Here, I'm running it on Windows 11 22H2.

Unlike THE, where you had to edit them separately, commands in Archy are actually small documents containing Python snippets embedded in the same workspace, and Archy's API is much more complete.

There are many such subsections and subdocuments. Besides the deletion document (now just called “DELETIONS”), your email is a document, your email server settings are a document, there is a document for formal Python modules which other commands can import, and there are several help documents. Each time you exit Archy, the entire workspace with all your commands, context, and settings is saved as a text file in the Archy folder with a new version number so you can go back to an old copy if you really screw up.