I just found out we lost one of the great pioneers of modern computing last week. While at Apple, Jef Raskin started the MacIntosh project in parallel with Steve Jobs' PARC-inspired Lisa. Raskin's Mac was character based and keyboard driven, far different from the final product produced after Jobs forced him out. His concepts were then used in the Canon Cat, a computer that didn't last long in the marketplace either because of its unique user interface or Steve Jobs' meddling.
The result of his time spent post-Apple is a UI he called The Humane Interface, about which you can learn more from The Raskin Center For Humane Interfaces. The link below is a Flash demo of the Archy UI that he thought would make computers as usable as humanly possible today. It's a remarkable vision incorporating ideas like the spacial indexing of stored information (it's easier to remember visually where you put something) that stretch back decades to his more recent ideas that you are better off directly manipulating information than you are doing indirect manipulation through proxies like icons.
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