Jef Raskin - Outside Interests

Outside Interests

While best known as a computer scientist, Raskin also had other interests. He conducted the San Francisco Chamber Opera Society and played various instruments, including the organ and the recorder. His artwork was displayed at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He received a patent for airplane wing construction, and designed and marketed radio controlled model gliders. He was said to be an accomplished archer, target shooter, bicycle racer and an occasional model race car driver. He was a passionate musician and composer, publishing a series of collected recorder studies using the pseudonym of Aabel Aabius. In his later years he also wrote free-lance articles for Macintosh magazines, such as MacHomeJournal as well as many modeling magazines, Forbes, Wired, and computing journals. One of his most favorite pastimes was to play music with his children. He would accompany them on the piano while they played or sang while going through old fake-books passed down from his father. They would also routinely improvise together.

Raskin owned a small company, "Jef's Friends", which made and sold model airplane kits through hobby shops. Somehow, he managed to turn most of his hobbies into profitable businesses.

One of Raskin's instruments was the organ. At his home he played an "army field organ", a portable reed organ designed for military chaplains, and he once bought a pipe organ from a convent in Belmont for the lobby at Apple. This was quickly rejected by Steve Jobs who had originally approved of the purchase. For at least the last 8 years of his life he played on a small pipe organ that he purchased in Switzerland. It arrived in the States in pieces and was put together by friends and family under his direction. Following the lead of Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth (with whom Raskin has played) who had designed his house around his own pipe organ, he designed a house in Brisbane, California to contain the organ, but the building project failed due to lack of a thorough soil analysis. The house project collapsed, and the project dissolved in a flurry of litigation. Then, Raskin accepted the job at Apple Computer as employee number 31. He persuaded Steve Jobs to reserve space in one of Apple's new buildings, "Bandley 3", for the organ to be installed and actually played. After some months, the convent asked Raskin when he actually wanted to haul the organ away. When Jobs reneged on his word, Raskin traveled to the convent with a San Jose Mercury News reporter to inspect the organ. Raskin, the reporter, and several Publications department employees trooped through the nuns' dormitory to reach the organ loft above the convent chapel. One employee, a soprano, tested the chapel's acoustics by singing Schubert's Ave Maria, and a few days later an article appeared describing the dilemma of a computer executive who owned a pipe organ and had no place to put it. A local church offered to buy the organ, at a modest loss, and the convent was able to install their new pipe organ. Curiously, a few years later, Raskin had a house big enough. On the day of Apple's IPO, Raskin bought a hilltop lot on Montebello Road with a small house on it, then sold his current house in the Cupertino flatlands. He built a much larger house, with an attached concert hall, whose acoustics had been designed by Bolt, Beranek and Newman. This hall was used for a variety of purposes, ranging from chamber-music concerts to vacation slide shows.