Jef Raskin’s cul-de-sac and the quest for the humane computer

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.