Joanna Hoffmann

Joanna Hofmann was a physicist and archeologist, before Jef Raskin hired her as the 5th person on the MacIntosh team in 1980, as the only marketing person in that early group.

She seems to have made many very important contributions to the original Mac and MacOS, including writing the first draft of the User Interface Guidelines. She was hired not least for her international background as Raskin says here: For example, he [Bruce Horn] attributes the internationalization of the products to the Lisa group, but it actually began when I hired Joanna Hoffmann into the Mac group partially because of her international background and my interest in providing international fonts.

She's been having a Wikipedia stub for quite some time, but not much more.

The Grand Unified Model (1): She seems to have been hooked on starting memes: If the Mac were able to be released in other countries, with menus, icons, dialogs, dates, and sorting orders translated to different languages, it would make a big improvement in our potential market share. I can't even remember when I started to recognize that the localization ability was necessary; it was a meme (probably started by Joanna Hoffman) that infected us all in the Mac group.

What Karen says about her I am still friendly with, and work with, a number of people from the Mac group. One person I worked with who I thought was brilliant was Joanna Hoffman. She focused on international marketing, and she was great to work with, and always had ideas. She was a person who wasn’t in software, but who made great contributions. (Susan Kare, an artist and graphic designer who created many of the interface elements for the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s)

"Alice, the Macintosh's first great game" Obviously Mrs. Hoffmann was pretty good at that one: Within a few weeks, I must have played hundreds of games of Alice, but the most prolific and accomplished player was Joanna Hoffman, the Mac's first marketing person. Joanna liked to come over to the software area toward the end of the day to see what was new, and now she usually ended up playing Alice for longer and longer periods. She had a natural talent for the game, and enjoyed relieving work-related stress by knocking out the rival chess pieces. She complained about the game being too easy, so Capps obliged by tweaking various parameters to keep it challenging for her, which was probably a mistake, since it made the game much too hard for average players.

Snowcrashing For all who have read Stephenson's "Snowcrash, most probably Joanna Hoffmann was the role model of 1 of 2 main female characters in that crashing novel. Guess who!

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