Source: Ars Technica
Article note: I've gone on the dive the author is basically writing a narrative of myself, and it's a lovely experience. This telling is well written and illustrated.
Like many models of computing that didn't take, from a modern perspective one of the biggest problems is Raskin's vision (grimly) wasn't sufficiently amenable to rent-seeking by vendors and their partners. Many of the abstractions he suggested work well in textual formats, but struggle to generalize to other media... and the ones that do have generally been adopted in some modified form much later (Timeline based NDE, zooming interfaces, etc.)
The Humane Interface is still worth a read, for the theory, to understand where many conventions came from, and to see the differences in how interface conventions are relative to how they were conceived.
Consider the cul-de-sac. It leads off the main street past buildings of might-have-been to a dead-end disconnected from the beaten path. Computing history, of course, is filled with such terminal diversions, most never to be fully realized, and many for good reason. Particularly when it comes to user interfaces and how humans interact with computers, a lot of wild ideas deserved the obscure burials they got.
But some deserved better. Nearly every aspiring interface designer believed the way we were forced to interact with computers was limiting and frustrating, but one man in particular felt the emphasis on design itself missed the forest for the trees. Rather than drowning in visual metaphors or arcane iconographies doomed to be as complex as the systems they represented, the way we deal and interact with computers should stress functionality first, simultaneously considering both what users need to do and the cognitive limits they have. It was no longer enough that an interface be usable by a human—it must be humane as well.
What might a computer interface based on those principles look like? As it turns out, we already know.
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