Perhaps the longest surviving legacy of your original design is its "appliance" nature. Has this simplicity of design been key to the Mac's popularity?
Yes, but unfortunately, the Mac is now a mess. A third party manual (Pogue's The Missing Manual) is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete. Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.
How do you rate today's Mac user interface?
My original vision is outdated and irrelevant. The principles of putting people first, and designing from the interface to the software and hardware, are as vital today as they were then.
And the iMac G5? Was the original iMac a step on the correct path?
The unfoldable portable-shaped box on a stalk? It is a practical and space-saving design. But the interface needs fixing. One only cares about getting something done. Apple has forgotten this key concept. The beautiful packaging is ho-hum and insignificant in the long run.
It seems the culmination of your work would be a computer invisible to the user; operating systems would disappear and applications would take on functionality as required.
Or a computer interface that, while not invisible, would not require conscious attention. [Bill Atkinson's] Hypercard did not have the properties to make its use unconscious. It was wonderful in many ways, however, and it would have been wise to keep it working on Apple's newer systems.
Has there been progress in computing over the past 20 years, or has it been a pointless chase of increasing power and complexity?
There has been immense progress, primarily in the richness of applications. But all this power is lost on many people, and impedes the utility of it for the rest, because of the unnecessary complexity of using computers.
The quest for CPU power has been largely defeated by bloated software in applications and operating systems. Some programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster.
The Macintosh changed the public's perception of computers. Are you proud of this?
I am only a footnote, but proud of the footnote I have become. My subsequent work - on eliciting principles and developing the theory of interface design, so that many people will be able to do what I did - is probably also footnote-worthy. In looking back at this turn-of-the-century period, the rise of a worldwide network will be seen as the most significant part of the computer revolution.
Gadgets?
My favourite is a Garrett Wade knife sharpener made out of a block of tungsten carbide. On the net, I search for sites when I need specific information. When my son wanted to know what camera to buy, I read camera review sites; to find a bush for our garden, I looked up gardening sites. I treasure the wide scope of the web.