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Title: Bill Atkinson, Hypercard Creator and Original Mac Team Member, Dies at
Age 74

Link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/06/08/016...

AppleInsider reports: The engineer behind much of the Mac's early graphical
user interfaces, QuickDraw, MacPaint, Hypercard and much more, William D.
"Bill" Atkinson, died on June 5 of complications from pancreatic cancer...
Atkinson, who built a post-Apple career as a noted nature photographer,
worked at Apple from 1978 to 1990. Among his lasting contributions to Apple's
computers were the invention of the menubar, the selection lasso, the
"marching ants" item selection animation, and the discovery of a midpoint
circle algorithm that enabled the rapid drawing of circles on-screen. He was
Apple Employee No. 51, recruited by Steve Jobs. Atkinson was one of the 30
team members to develop the first Macintosh, but also was principle designer
of the Lisa's graphical user interface (GUI), a novelty in computers at the
time. He was fascinated by the concept of dithering, by which computers using
dots could create nearly photographic images similar to the way newspapers
printed photos. He is also credited (alongside Jobs) for the invention of
RoundRects, the rounded rectangles still used in Apple's system messages,
application windows, and other graphical elements on Apple products.
Hypercard was Atkinson's main claim to fame. He built the a hypermedia
approach to building applications that he once described as a "software
erector set." The Hypercard technology debuted in 1987, and greatly opened up
Macintosh software development. In 2012 some video clips of Atkinson appeared
in some rediscovered archival footage. (Original Macintosh team developer
Andy Hertzfeld uploaded "snippets from interviews with members of the
original Macintosh design team, recorded in October 1983 for projected TV
commercials that were never used." Blogger John Gruber calls Atkinson "One
of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history." If you
want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org site and (re-
)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here's just one, with Steve Jobs
inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Here's another (surely near and
dear to my friend Brent Simmons's heart) with this kicker of a closing line:
"I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a
couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he
gladly complied." Some of his code and algorithms are among the most
efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock
full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making
the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that
hardware... In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw,
Atkinson was also the creator of MacPaint (which to this day stands as the
model for bitmap image editors� - �Photoshop, I would argue, was conceptually
derived directly from MacPaint) and HyperCard ("inspired by a mind-expanding
LSD journey in 1985", the influence of which cannot be overstated. I say
this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer
programmer who ever lived. Without question, he's on the short list. What a
man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.

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