Since I posted this article several years ago on Slashdot, this page has become an Internet starting point for discussing a number of different issues, ranging from "What is your idea of the ultimate geek poster?" to discussions about the turbulent relationship between Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs, the two fathers of the Apple Macintosh computer, to discussions about what it means to see things from an purely engineering versus an aesthetic point of view.

One of the things that fascinates people about this poster is that it is undoubtedly the tangible byproduct of two great minds, those of Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin, working together yet not necessarily seeing eye-to-eye. There are few examples of this, aside from the Macintosh, that exist today.

The late Jef Raskin kindly edited, clarified, and co-authored the first version of this with me before he passed away, and, for this, I am grateful.

This poster was given to me by my uncle around 1980. At the time, my uncle headed up a print shop, Westwood Press, in Redwood City, California. The company specialized in high-end corporate printing. They had an incredibly expensive printing press, imported from Europe, which, I believe, gave them a competitive edge in Silicon Valley, particularly when doing full color, glossy corporate artwork.

We toured his facility one summer and I remember a small stack of a few glossy posters he had taken off the press for our tour. I recognized several to be from Apple (at that time named Apple Computer, Inc.) My uncle, being a generous and cool guy, allowed us to take home several pieces of corporate artwork.

The posters would eventually become known as the Apple “Syntax” Posters, and they would become interesting windows into the early days of Silicon Valley during the late 70’s / early 1980's when technology engineering and aesthetic design were still forming an uneasy friendship.

Over the years, I had become quite enamored with the strangeness of the poster. I didn't know what it was or how it worked. As far as I could tell, it was a syntax chart for a programming language -- Apple Pascal.

There was an incredible amount of raw, geeky data contained on it, it was very colorful, yet I did not understand the colors. Over the years of looking at it, I came up with some questions that I found somewhat perplexing and decided to research them.

First, why do the colors not make sense?
The top left portion is dark pink and light pink. On the other hand, the portion to the direct right of it has a variety of different colors. Was this intentional?

Second, why is it on ultra-glossy, thick paper
Most programmer documentation isn't hung on the wall. This one could be. Is this useful artwork? Is it a programming table? Did people hang it on the wall?

Last, what is the story behind this poster?
I have seen poor quality pull-out magazine "geek" posters which have conveyed some very useful data, though I have yet to see a poster strangely similar in both high quality and high utility as this one.

What is the story behind it?

Initially, I had to do a bit of research to find people who were present at Apple back in 1979. This wasn’t easy.  It amounted to sending off a variety of "Have You Seen This?" e-mails to people who are now old enough to look back on this as a mere blip in their overall lives.

From examining early footage and pictures from that time, it was quite obvious that the poster had made its way around onto the walls of Apple employees.

Likewise, as crazy as it sounds, Pascal was the de facto standard programming language in early Apple and Macintosh application development. Bill Atkinson, a student of Jef Raskin’s at the University of California, San Diego, had written the compiler.  C was not widely adopted yet.

After more than a dozen emails, two people responded -- Andy Hertzfeld and Jef Raskin.

Not only did Jef know about the syntax poster, as head of the Apple publications department, he had spearheaded the effort to design it and and put it into production.

I had been aware of Raskin’s famous penchant for claiming he invented things.  Hertzfeld’s website of early Apple stories, Folklore, has an incredibly funny story about Burrell Smith imitating Jef that is often quoted by fans of geek lore.

However, I found Jef to be helpful and straightforward.

Raskin's purpose for designing a new syntax chart in a poster format was utilitarian. He found that many of the existing published Pascal charts had errors when applied to Bill Atkinson's Apple Pascal compiler.

Raskin began the project using Niklaus Wirth's original PASCAL - User Manual and Report (Springer-Verlag,1974)  as his guide.

He fixed the errors, though he found himself making some innovations to the chart. He made organizational changes that made the original chart more useful. As a finishing touch, he color-coded it so that a higher lexical element's color would correspond to the syntax diagram below that explained it.

A poster format was chosen so that the programmer could glance up and have his desk free from clutter. Raskin's original color-coding scheme made it such that the poster could be glanced at from a desk or from across the room.

It would be a year before Post-It notes were introduced to America, so coding clutter was likely out of control. The syntax poster was clean enough and elegant enough that it would not look obtrusive hanging on a wall in an office.

It sounds like a simple story, except for one thing.

Raskin says that when he approached Jobs to explain the concept to him, Jobs understood the idea and how the flow chart worked.

However, he did not fully understand how the colors worked, even though Raskin explained it to him several times. Raskin, often described as being hard-headed and cerebral, described Jobs as being obstinate and difficult to teach. Clearly, these were both strong-willed people who were butting heads.

According to Raskin, Jobs was not as much interested in as much about how the poster was supposed to work, rather, he thought it was unattractive -- particularly if it was going to be used for promotional activities.  If programmers, students, and hobbyists, which comprised much of Apple’s market, were going to have exposure to these, they had to at least look exciting.

Without telling anyone, Jobs independently hired an artist, San Francisco's Tom Kamifuji, a hot, up-and-coming artist in the late 70's / early 80's, to redo Raskin’s poster.

Jobs gave Kamifuji free reign to make it more artistic and presentable, though Jobs failed to explain to the artist that the original color schemes were necessary for making the chart easy and useful for programmers.

Since the artist did not have a tech background per se, the results would turn out to be a collision of logic and aesthetics.

The Jobs / Kamifuji idea of a Pascal Poster was such that, if it was going to be on the wall, it should be easy to view from across the room. Hence, they theorized that very bright, fluorescent “dayglow” colors would be best.

This sounds like a good idea in theory; for example, a numeric digit could be coded bright blue and, from across the room, you would know that the bright blue dot represented a numeric digit in the flow chart.

However, without a clear understanding of the functional aspects of the piece, the Jobs / Kamifuji project descended into a gigantic, chaotic mix of jumbled colors, boxes, circles, and rounded rectangles:

Readability
For example, the "Statement" syntax block features a "reddish pink on hot pink" motif, which is difficult to read up close, much less across the room.

Confusing Similiarities
The Unsigned Number motif is "yellow on yellow", the Unsigned Integer motif is "yellow on green".

Modes
The word "IDENTIFIER" is colored in four different colors: purple, green, white, orange, and (not shown) pink. One could argue that the colors are in different "modes" or "contexts" in which they were used. Jef had famously argued against "modes".

Just as Raskin’s penchant for claiming creative invention is well-documented, Steve Jobs’ early collisions with engineering sensibilities is also well-known; for more information, Andy Hertzfeld wrote a piece entitled “PC Board Esthetics” detailing how Jobs believed internal components on a motherboard should look. This eventually led to overheating problems in early Macs.

The project had been completed, though there were mixed feelings.  Raskin believed that Jobs had ignored the functional purpose of the poster, while Jobs believed that Raskin had no taste.

At any rate, Raskin maintained that Jobs ordered his name removed as the creator of the work and placed Kamifuji’s name in its place. I was not able to find a reason for this, either. Kamifuji was hot, but not incredibly famous. Was it for intimidation? Was it just artistic control? Raskin did not know the reason, but felt that this action was, in his words, “morally wrong”.

The number 030-0111-00 in the photo, beside the artist's name, is a standard Apple document number. The 030 means it is part of the technical document series. 0111 means it is document # 111, and 00 means it is revision 0 (that is, the first copy). Today's Apple documents are well beyond 5000.

The poster, despite its chaotic Jobs/Kamifuji color scheme, still contained Raskin’s “correct” logic flow chart, and ended up being over the desk of every programmer at Apple. It also found its way externally, to be placed over the desks of many programmers outside of Apple.

Andy Hertzfeld added that he believes they may have also been given to dealers to promote Apple Pascal.

Ex-Computerland (an early Apple dealer) employee Bruce Barrett says Hertzfeld is correct - the posters were given to dealers and also given out to Apple customers.