"The personal computer industry was an outgrowth of the 60s' counterculture," the editor said. "It was a rock-and-roll business in those days. Look at (Apple's famous) 1984 ad. It symbolized a generation shift. The IBM PC was the computer of the establishment. The Mac's purpose in life was to be the computer of the anti-establishment. I mean, it had the psychedelic interface: 'Wow man, good visuals.'

"If they hadn't been smoking pot, maybe they wouldn't have invented the Mac," he said. "It would have been another Apple II, or an IBM PC. It would not have been the Mac. Who would have thought they wanted a computer to be cute?"

Half joking, the editor suggested further evidence of pot's influence could be found in the Mac's stoned, smiley startup face, the rainbow colors of the Apple logo, and early software like MacPaint, a drawing program perfect for drug-induced doodling. Nothing like it existed on the PC platform, despite the fact that a lot of Windows programmers –- some now very rich and famous -– were also dopers, according to the editor.

"We all noticed this when we were covering this stuff," he said. "At PC Expo, people smell like booze. At Macworld, people smell like marijuana."

The editor said there's even a special pot smoking area around the back of San Francisco's Moscone Center, the long-time venue of Macworld Expo, known as "the office."

"Ten or 20 people are there all day long," the editor said. "CEOs, programmers, authors. People say, I'm just going to the 'the office' for a couple of minutes."

However, the editor's claims were strongly disputed by Raskin, the "father" of the Macintosh.

"As the creator of the Macintosh project, and the guy who named it 'Macintosh' after his beloved McIntosh apples, I can firmly say that pot had nothing to do with it," Raskin said in an e-mail. "Unlike our previous president, I have never even brought a reefer to lip, much less inhaled it. I also do not use alcohol, tobacco or any other recreational drugs, and never have."

Raskin said to the best of his knowledge, there was no pot smoking at Apple by the Mac team during his tenure, and no other drug use.

"I never saw Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak use pot," he wrote. "What people did at home or after I left Apple is, of course, beyond my knowledge, but even at our social occasions, drugs were not a part of the scene. Pizza, yes. Puns, yes. Play, yes. Pot, no.... I even prefer my apples unfermented."

Raskin was backed up by David Bunnell, the founding editor of Macworld magazine, who said he saw no pot smoking at Apple.

"I never saw any evidence of that among the people who created the Mac," he said. "And I was there. I was intimately involved with the Mac development team. I had free access to the Mac building. I don't recall seeing any evidence of people smoking pot while they were developing the machine."

Bunnell conceded that any pot smoking may have been witnessed only by those who were sympathetic to it.

"They didn't invite me," he said. "Maybe I was too straight."

But Bunnell noted that if pot has been smoked at Apple, it could account for the machine's relatively sluggish performance.

"Maybe that's why Macs have been slower all these years," he said.