Bill Atkinson, the inventor of Macintosh Pioneer and Hypercard, passed away 74
My first meeting Bill Atkinson is memorable. It was November 1983, and I had a report on the Rolling Stones, and I could access the team, which planned to launch the Macintosh computer early next year. Everyone kept telling me: “Wait until you meet Bill and Andy,” referring to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two key writers of Mac software. This is what I wrote about encounters in the book. Crazy Great:
I first met Bill Atkinson. A tall man with unruly hair, pancho villa’s beard and blue eyes, one of his turns is the disturbing intensity of Bruce Dern, just like the godless veterinarian in Vietnam. Like everyone else in the room, he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. “Do you want to see a mistake?” he asked me. He pulled me into the compartment and pointed at his McIntosh. The fill screen is an incredibly detailed drawing of the insect. It’s pretty, you might see it on expensive workstations in a research lab, but not on a personal computer. Atkinson laughed at his jokes and then became very serious, speaking with a person who was almost respectful, which made his words noble. “The barrier between words and pictures has been broken,” he said. “The art world has been a sacred club so far. Just like the beautiful China. It is now available for daily use.”
Atkinson is right. His contribution to Macintosh was crucial to the breakthrough he whispered to me in the Apple office that day. In a few years, he will make another huge contribution through a show called HyperCard Singles, which heralds the World Wide Web. Through all this, he retains his energy and Joie de Vivre and becomes the inspiration for everyone who will change the world through code. On June 5, 2025, he died of a long-term illness. He is 74 years old.
Atkinson has no plans to be a pioneer in personal computing. As a graduate student, he studied computer science and neurobiology at the University of Washington. But when he met Apple II in 1977, he fell in love and worked for the company he built a year later. He is an employee No. 51. In 1979, he was Steve Jobs’ group that led to Xerox Parc Research Lab and was shocked by the graphical computer interface he saw there. Turning this futuristic technology into a consumer job became his job, working on Apple’s Lisa project. In the process, he invented many conventions that are still on today’s computers, such as the menu bar. Atkinson also created QuickDraw, a groundbreaking technique that can effectively draw objects on the screen. One of these objects is a “circular” and a box with rounded corners will become part of everyone’s computing experience. Atkinson rejected the idea until Jobs made him walk around the block and see all the traffic signs and other rounded objects.
When Jobs took over another Apple project inspired by PARC technology, he poached Atkinson, whose work had already affected the product. Hertzfield, who is in charge of the MAC interface, once explained to me the Lisa feature he granted for Mac: “I took anything Bill Atkinson did, nothing else,” he said. Atkinson, upset with Lisa’s high-priced label, accepted the idea of a more affordable version and began writing MacPaint, a program that will enable users to create artwork on their bitmap screens.
After the Mac was launched, the team began to unravel. Atkinson holds the title of Apple Fellow, which freely pursues passion projects. He started working on what he called the Magic Slate, a device with a high-resolution screen that weighs less than a pound and can be controlled by a stylus and a brush on the touch screen. Basically, he designed the iPad 25 years in advance. However, the technology is not ready to create something so tiny and powerful at an affordable price (Atkinson hopes it’s so cheap that you can afford to lose six in a year and not get bothered.) “I want the magic board so good that I can taste it,” he once told me.
