2004 is indeed the 20th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh computer, but the history of this computer is actually a little older than this. Following is an interview with Jef Raskin (JR) who started the Apple Macintosh project. Frank Ling (FL) from berkeley Groks talks to him about how the project got started, his perspectives on current operating systems, and his current work. FL: Perhaps we could start by talking about how this project was begun and your views on how the interface has evolved since then. JR: When I was a graduate student in computer science at Penn State -- because of my strong interests in the arts, music, and visual arts -- I was assigned the task of helping people in the computer center, for people who were in the fine arts or the liberal arts, and they struggled trying to use the computer. Most of the other computer science grad students had the opinion that there were those people who got it and those people who just don't get it. But once I observed them working, I realize it was not the people who were having the problem, it was the fact that the way our computer systems were designed that was giving them all the problems, and the reason why the people got it got it was because they spent a lot of time learning all the intracacies of how they work. And I realized that we should be designing computer systems to make them easier to use and that was more important than what I was being taught in my computer science classes, such as how to make programs run in minimal time or minimal space and how to do those trade-offs. All of that is interesting and valuable. I used that inflational time in designing systems, but it was the interface that was clearly most at fault. FL: And this was during the '60s right? JR: Yeah, I graduated in '67. FL: I understand you did some work before you arrived at Apple on the graphical user interface. Maybe you can tell us a little about that. JR: What I did write my thesis -- over the objections of my thesis adviser -- was that computers should be graphic from the get go. Those days, everything was all character generators and I said characters were just a special case of graphics and I wanted to do music notation, I wanted to do various languages and of course you could not do that on computers in those days. So, I had very firmly in my mind the idea of having a computer being bit-graphics based. I built my own graphic input device, which turns out to be the same year that Engelbart was developing the mouse. And that led to my wanting to design the Macintosh when I worked for Apple. At the time, Apple had the Apple II and was working on the Apple III, and even the original Lisa was a character generated machine, and I was proposing a graphics-based machine that I called Macintosh for my favorite kind of apple that grows on trees. Full interview hereBerkeley Groks