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

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 editorsâ — âPhotoshop, 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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