Bill Atkinson, Hypercard Creator and Original Mac Team Member, Dies at Age 74 (appleinsider.com) 9
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.
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.
Pancreatic cancer? (Score:2)
What did HyperCard even do? (Score:1)
I remember it being installed, and had no idea what the hell it was useful for. Everyone else who used a Mac didn't either.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. Also, DIVA videoshop which was the 1st good video editor was made in it! It later exploded as a rewritten pro app, known as AVID. It inspired and influenced many other things; like web pages. QuickDraw was like a precursor to PDF and helped Mac dominate publishing.
Wish people still realized the superiority of the universal top-edge Menu Bar! I won't use a system without one... and Linux needs to make that easier to configure.
Re: Pancreatic cancer? (Score:2)
No, pancreatic cancer is not a "Cali" thing. Too little is known about causes it. I can tell you that 3 nuclear physicists in a lab of 20 in France died of the same cancer, including my dad. Those are way higher stats than normal. It very likely has to do with radioactivity exposure. That shouldn't have been an issue in Apple buildings, though. But could be something else environmental still.
He will be missed (Score:3)
I did a lot of small Apps/Stacks, notable an Japanese - English/German dictionary.
I did not know that you could install a jap. keyboard, lol. So I made a card/page with hand drawn Hiragana. As using the mouse to type was a bit cumbersome, I wrote a parser from roma(n)hi to Japanese characters. Basically I only looked up the picture of the char in my keyboard, and drew that where it was needed. All data was in "roma(n)ji". No Japanese characters. Did Unicode exist at that time (~1990)?
At some point a co student mocked me about my "crude looking font". When I explained, I had drawn it with my mouse, he looked dumb folded and "installed" in front of my eyes a Japanese (and a few other) keyboards.
At that time it never came to my mind to check system preferences for more languages or keyboards - lol.
I read somewhere, he programmed his first version, in just a few weeks ... astonishing!
Probably the most unknown genius at Apple (Score:2)
Everyone always talks about Woz but it sure seems like Atkinson deserves nearly as much praise.
Sad to see one of the great ones go, but accomplished so much for so many and that is better than a lot of people manage.
Hypercard (Score:2)
This always seemed to me to be a big influence on the web: the idea of pages/cards which could call up data and interact.