There are two arguments some use to try and diminish Steve Jobs contribution to the Macintosh, and by extension all of desktop computing. The first and by far most common is to say that Jobs merely copied what he saw at Xerox Parc. While there is absolutely no doubt both the Macintosh and NeXT grew out of what Steve saw, he even said as much, the system at Parc was akin to an automobile before the Model T. It was unrefined, complicated, and not user friendly. This is why Microsoft copied mostly from the Macintosh (and later NeXTStep) rather than anything from Xerox to make Windows.

The second and more obscure argument is that Jobs merely took over the Macintosh project from Jef Raskin, the suggestion being that Raskin invented the computer and that Jobs swooped in to take credit at the last second. What that argument omits is that Raskin’s vision for the Macintosh was very different than what shipped. How different? Raskin didn’t want a mouse. Here’s Andy Hertzfeld over at the venerable Folklore.org:

He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product [utilized] very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh.

We know this is true not just because of Hertzfeld’s own account, but also because Raskin did eventually get to release his computer in 1987, the Canon Cat. Sure enough, it indeed didn’t use mouse and instead relied on what were called “leap keys”. Cameron Kaiser recently went into detail of how the Cat worked.

Getting around with the Cat requires knowing which keys do what, though once you’ve learned that, they never change. To enter text, just type. There are no cursor keys and no mouse; all motion is by leaping—that is, holding down either LEAP key and typing something to search for. Single taps of either LEAP key “creep” you forward or back by a single character.

Special control sequences are executed by holding down USE FRONT and pressing one of the keys marked with a blue function (like we did for the setup menu). The most important of these is USE FRONT-HELP (the N key), which explains errors when the Cat “beeps” (here, flashes its screen), or if you release the N key but keep USE FRONT down, you can press another key to find out what it does.

Needless to say, the Cat wasn’t the huge success Raskin hoped it would be.