Jef Raskin developed his core ideas about human-computer interaction in the 1970s and 1980s. They have not aged the way most technology ideas age. The specific hardware he worked with is obsolete. The principles he derived from studying how humans actually use that hardware are, if anything, more relevant now than when he wrote them.
This section applies his thinking to contemporary technology — not as an exercise in historical reverence, but because the problems he identified are still the problems we have.
Background: The Humane Interface — Raskin’s principles in full →
May 24, 2026
In 1987, Jef Raskin shipped a computer with no menus, no file browser, no application launcher, and no toolbar. To find anything — a word in a document, a command, a previously typed note — you held a key and started typing. The computer jumped to the nearest match instantly. That was the entire navigation model.
The machine was the Canon Cat. It sold for about $1,500, was discontinued after six months due to internal Canon politics, and became a footnote in computing history.
May 5, 2026
In 1979, Jef Raskin wrote that modes were one of the fundamental design failures of computer interfaces. A mode, in his definition, is any state in which the same user action produces a different result than it would in another state. Caps Lock is a mode. A dialog box that blocks the rest of the interface is a mode. The difference between “insert” and “overtype” in a word processor is a mode.