The Infamous Apple Pascal Syntax Poster
Written By Lucas Wagner and Jef Raskin
Full Resolution Version [1907 × 2917]
Overview
Since posting this article on Slashdot several years ago, 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 what it means to see things from an purely engineering versus a purely aesthetic point of view.
Ultimately, the poster is a byproduct of the turbulent relationship between Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs, the two fathers of the Apple Macintosh computer, if there were such a thing. It is undoubtedly the tangible byproduct of two great minds working together, yet not necessarily seeing eye-to-eye.
While the friction in their relationship has been written about in detail, there are few actual examples of Raskin’s and Jobs’ difference in perspective that still exist today. Thanks to Pascal and Apple enthusiasts, the Apple Pascal Syntax Poster has been kept and preserved for future generations to read about.
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.
Origins
My uncle, Roger Heyl, printed these. In fact, he gave me several samples of the Apple Pascal Syntax poster around 1980. At the time, his company, Westwood Press in Redwood City (California), specialized in high-end corporate printing. They had an incredibly expensive printing press, imported from Europe, which gave them a competitive edge when working with flashy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, eager to display their creations using full color, glossy signage.
We toured his facility one summer and I remember a small stack of a few 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 Pascal Syntax Posters, and they would become interesting windows into the early days of Silicon Valley during the late 70’s / early 1980′s when engineering, technology, and aesthetic design were still forming an uneasy friendship.
Questions
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, but I could not understand the colors. What did they mean? Over the years of looking at it, I came up with some questions that I found somewhat perplexing and decided to research them.
Question 1: 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?
Question 2: Why is it on ultra-glossy, thick paper?
Programming manuals throughout history have always tended to be thick, black & white, and minimalist. 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?
Question 3: 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.
First Steps
Initially, I had to do a bit of research to find people who were actual employees of Apple in 1979. This wasn’t easy. It amounted to sending off a variety of “You don’t know me, but have you seen this?” e-mails to people. This was a mere blip in their lives thirty years prior.
From examining early footage and pictures from that time, it was apparent that the poster had made its way around onto the walls of Apple employees.
Pascal, a language known for its appeal in academic circles, 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 until much later.
After more than a dozen emails, two people responded — Andy Hertzfeld and Jef Raskin.
John Sculley + Poster, circa 1984
At one time, it was not strange among geeks to have a
programming language proudly stenciled on your t-shirt.
A Logic-Based Approach
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, which has now become the stuff of folklore. In fact, Hertzfeld’s website of early Apple stories, Folklore, has a funny story about Burrell Smith imitating Jef Raskin that is often quoted by fans of geek trivia.
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 syntax 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. It had to be approved by Steve Jobs.
Niklaus Wirth’s Original Pascal Flow Charts, 1974
Jef Raskin + Poster, circa 1980.
Design-Based Approach
Raskin says that when he approached Jobs to explain the concept to him, Jobs quickly understood the idea and how the flow chart worked.
However, he did not fully understand how the colors worked. This was where tension began to develop initially. Raskin explained its utilitarian color scheme to him several times. Raskin, sometimes described as being hard-headed and cerebral himself, 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 learning the poster was supposed to work, rather, he dismissed it outright as unattractive. If the poster was going to be used for promotional activities, it had to have an edge to it. If programmers, students, and hobbyists, which comprised much of Apple’s market, were going to have something on their wall, Jobs reasoned, there needed to be something about it that made it look exciting.
Without telling anyone, Jobs took over the project and 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 the poster 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.
Kamifuji took liberties with the colors, using a now infamous “day-glo” color scheme that would eventually come to symbolize what people either hated or loved about the 1980′s. Since the artist did not have a tech background per se, the results would turn out to be a collision of logic and aesthetics:
Kamifuji’s “Jobs-Friendly” Color Scheme (Detail)
Steve Jobs with another early Apple poster printed by my uncle:
the famous IBM motto “THINK” colored in the Apple rainbow.
Perspectives Colliding
Taken with a flash to show brightness/reflectivity; it’s definitely bright
Just as Raskin’s penchant for claiming creative invention is well-documented, Steve Jobs’ early collisions with engineering sensibilities is also well-known. 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 Jobs / Kamifuji concept of a Pascal Syntax Poster was that, if it was going to be on the wall, it should be beautiful as well as bright while viewing from across the room. They theorized the bright, fluorescent “dayglow” colors would be better than conventional colors.
To Raskin, this sounded like a good idea in theory; for example, a numeric digit could be coded bright blue and, from across the room, a programmer 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.
Low-Contrast 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.
Multiple Shades of Pink on … Pink?
Confusing Similarities
The Unsigned Number motif is “yellow on yellow”, the Unsigned Integer motif is “yellow on green”.
Use of Modes
The word “IDENTIFIER” is colored in four different colors: purple, green, yellow, orange, and pink. The colors are used in different “modes” or “contexts”, depending on where they were located on the poster. Jef had famously argued against “modes”.
An identifier’s color changes depending on which context or mode it’s in.
The colors are interesting, but nearly impossible to distinguish at a distance.
Aftermath
With Kamifuji’s input, the project had been completed and the results were sent to my uncle.
There were mixed feelings, however. Raskin believed that Jobs had ignored the functional purpose of the poster and made it more difficult to use, while Jobs believed that Raskin had no aesthetic taste.
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.
The resulting work was a collision of chaotic design mixed with hard logic.
Raskin’s name was removed and replaced by Kamifuji’s name.
