The dean of Macintosh design, Jef Raskin, succumbed to pancreatic cancer on Saturday in his home of Pacifica. A true visionary, he helped bring computing to the masses by thinking of new and better ways of bridging the gap between the machine and the user. His latest project, 'Archy,' is due to be released shortly. SFist mourns his passing.

Of course, we didn't know who to thank at the time, but when we got our hands on our first Macintosh, we were hooked. Our mom brought the old SE home in one of those trademark bags. At the time our home hosted an incredibly powerful Sanyo 8086 clone with 256kb of RAM and an amber monochrome monitor, running MS-DOS. Zork was pretty much the killer app at the time. But the Mac -- oh, the Mac! -- with it's crisp, black and white display, mouse (mouse!) and cool sounds made us realize that computers could one day sing and dance. We're typing this now on a PowerBook that has hundreds and thousands times more power, and an entirely new interface that even Jef had his problems with. But even Windows owes some serious debts to his pioneering work. He will be truly missed.

Image from Sourceforge.