The first, and most famous, was his role in developing the Macintosh. Raskin was employee No. 31 at Apple (AAPL ) before the launch of the Macintosh, iMac, iPod, or any of the other ubiquitous brands that have made the company famous. He headed the Macintosh project back when it consisted of just four or five people, says former co-worker Bruce "Tog"

    Tognazzini, who was employee No. 66 at Apple and hired by Raskin. Raskin's vision: to build an affordable computer designed for nontechy consumers -- a radical idea at a time when using a computer required memorizing complex codes and commands. Raskin's credits include "drag and drop" capability and introducing Apple's founders to much of the work at Xerox's XRX ) Palo Alto Research Center, which made such innovations as the the mouse and the basic structure for the windows and folders still prevalent on operating systems today. And Raskin bestowed the project with the name Macintosh, after his favorite kind of apple.

    Raskin then took time to do what he loved most: teaching and thinking. He studied how people used computers for 10 years, writing the book The Humane Interface.

    About four years ago, still disgusted by the difficulty of computer use, he decided to give his vision another try. He founded the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces, a nonprofit that's developing Archy. He had already been working on the concept for two years with Aza, a math whiz who published his first writings on physics at the age of 19.

    Raskin had many passions: his family, music, art, and archery among them. But making computers simpler to use dominated his creative time. Friends quote words of wisdom he would use over and over again. He liked to say, "How much work does a user get done on a desktop?" The answer is none, that it's wasted time trying to find an application or file -- a problem he was trying to solve with Archy.

    Raskin is survived by his children, Aza, Aviva, Aenea, and Rebecca, and his wife of 23 years, Linda Blum. The family hasn't announced a memorial service yet. No doubt he'll be missed, but his contributions to the Information Age will not be forgotten.

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