However, there is other anecdote which says..
Andy Herzfeld, one of the Macintosh’s developers, says that Raskin is “much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh’s father,”
However, ..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.
https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/October-...
As I’m about to type into another reply in this thread...
I think the conclusion to be drawn from discussions like this is that although narcissists like to suggest they and they alone provided the “magic spark” that make projects successful, it is an entire team of people who actually create revolutionary products.
The business press—and society on average—love the myth of the visionary entrepreneur, but upon close inspection, success has many parents.
You create the impression Raskin created the Macintosh instead, but Raskin was working on a text menu based system nothing like the Macintosh so that just flat out doesn't fly. Raskin assembled the Macintosh team, but the creative vision for the Mac certainly didn't come from Raskin.
As typed into another reply in this thread...
I think the conclusion to be drawn from discussions like this is that although narcissists like to suggest they and they alone provided the “magic spark” that make projects successful, it is an entire team of people who actually create revolutionary products.
The business press—and society on average—love the myth of the visionary entrepreneur, but upon close inspection, success has many parents.
Raskin’s vision was that it be low-cost and emphasize the user experience. But he and Jobs had very different ideas about how to accomplish this. Raskin did not want to create a computer people couldn’t afford, and his ideas for a new user experience were based on things like incremental search, not shipping an expensive (for the time) peripheral like a mouse.
Likewise, a bitmapped display and the cimputing power to make it work added too much cost for the computer to be an appliance in Jef’s mind, so he eschewed the kind of things Apple was doing with LISA, based on Xerox’s Star.
However, Jobs may have lost his power in the boardroom, but he outranked Raskin, and he pushed Raskin out. The Macintosh became another LISA, but without the overhead created by a design team trying to recreate much of the richness of the Star.
The Macintosh that shipped was less expensive than LISA, but certainly not inexpensive enough to be an appliance. They were way more expensive than The PCs of the day, and might well have fizzled had Aldus not shipped PageMaker and created a “killer app” for Macintosh the way VisiCalc created a killer app for early PCs.
The story Apple likes to tell about Jobs creating Macintosh is entertaining, but the backstory is much more educational for those of us working in mid-sized or larger companies, with all of the conflicting requirements, tradeoffs, and yes, politics.
Plenty more of that kind if thing at http://folklore.org/
There’s a collection of stories about Jef Raskin. He was an iconoclast with an insanely focused vision:
https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&ch...