Bill Atkinson, Hypercard Creator and Original Mac Team Member, Dies at Age 74 (appleinsider.com) 53
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:3, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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QuickDraw was like a precursor to PDF and helped Mac dominate publishing.
No, QuickDraw is like DirectX, it's totally pixel/bitmap based and nothing at all like PDF or its actual precursor, PostScript. And a universal top-edge menu bar makes sense only for small screens, where it will always be nearby. When you have lots of windows with different functions on a high resolution display, it makes sense for each of them to have its own menu bar. And MacOS needed to make that easier to configure. There were some hacks which did it, but I found them to be flaky.
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Nope. Not literally same but similarity. QuickDraw's model allowed for it to be scaled for printing and it had standard scalable fonts. This allowed perfect recreation when printing it. The drawing commands were saved in a data format called PICT which was a no-code version of the drawing commands which also could include pixelmaps. PICT data was often used to playback graphics commands. It was similar to how PDF abstracted away the postscript programming language.
A universal menu bar follows Fitt's Law for
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QuickDraw's model allowed for it to be scaled for printing
You think you cannot scale up DirectX?
and it had standard scalable fonts.
QuickDraw and Color QuickDraw both predate Mac OS support for scalable fonts, which did not occur until TrueType. Previously you had to use Adobe Type Manager software to get scalable fonts, and all pre-TypeType fonts provided by Apple were bitmaps. That's why 1) fonts came in sizes, you had to add all of the sizes you wanted with the Font/FA Mover and 2) when you scaled system fonts up for printing, they looked like shit, as demonstrated by printing them on a dot matri
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Isn't DirectX like a decade Later?! QuickDraw is 80s. DirectX is 90s. Plenty of time for MS to copy it; like they did illegally with Quicktime (there was a court case MS lost, BTW. I remember that even had source code comments from Apple's source.)
True, TrueType didn't come out with QuickDraw 1. I remember bitmap fonts and ATM; although, I didn't touch publishing until System 7 at which point bitmap fonts were not used. Apple worked closely with Adobe; they should have probably bought it out later on... an
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Wasn't Myst written with this?
I think it was prototyped in HyperCard. But it had to move to something else; so that it could both be ported to Windows, and to be compatible with Post-HyperCard-Era Macs, too.
Re:What did HyperCard even do? (Score:5, Informative)
No, MYST shipped as a HyperCard application. They used one of the compatible runtimes for Windows to port it (there were several of them available). The RealMYST remake (the one that plays more like an FPS where you can walk anywhere rather than fixed viewpoints) obviously uses a different engine. The various versions on Steam are also using a new runtime.
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No, MYST shipped as a HyperCard application. They used one of the compatible runtimes for Windows to port it (there were several of them available). The RealMYST remake (the one that plays more like an FPS where you can walk anywhere rather than fixed viewpoints) obviously uses a different engine. The various versions on Steam are also using a new runtime.
Thanks for the clarification!
Visual programming language (Score:4, Informative)
What did HyperCard even do?
It's kind of hard to explain, and honestly my memory of what you could do with Hypercard and how you actually did it is very fuzzy as it was so long ago.
But basically it was a visual programming languages, where the visual bits you drug around were then also backed by actual code that would do things. You would create a variety of cards, and in those cards could store data, move on to other cards, and so forth.
Some people used it to create games, but used it to create an inventory tracking system for a store, and probably some other stuff I have forgotten about.
In the end, it was a way to make programming a lot more approachable to people at a time when programming was VERY low level for the most part!
A key part of it was once you made a stack of cards it was very easy to share with other people as a kind of application (but one you could modify in any way you liked).
You might get a better feel reading this Tribute To Hypercard [philippe-f...-viger.com].
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The "Hyper" part of HyperCard is the same meaning as "HyperText" as in "HyperText Transfer Protocol" (aka HTTP).
Hyper in this context means links, and HyperCard is basically a stack of cards that are linked together in some fashion so clicking on something on one card can take you to another card. Just like with the web, clicking on a link can take you to another web page. That is what it is in a nutshell.
Now, HyperCard card links can do a lot of things, especially when you add a bit of code behind it. It c
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Yes great to mention the linking aspect, that was key to the whole thing being really useful.
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Hypercard was great for slide decks, whacking together some cheap and dirty computations that had an understandable interface, recording all all sorts of minutiae, whacking together mockups of an app you want to build so you can see how the interface works, etc.
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At the easiest level it is to think of it as linked web pages running locally.
Basically you did stacks of cards that could contain things like information, buttons and such and you could then navigate them like you can a web site today.
But on a more complex level it could actually also have actual scripts and such in addition.
As to what to use it for:
-We did a adventure game based on exploring a crazy mages whacky dungeon on it and shared it with others.
-But more seriously it was used for things like traini
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Hypercard + Internet (sort of) = WWW
Hyperscript influenced Actionscript, Applescript and Javascript.
Re: What did HyperCard even do? (Score:4, Informative)
Bill required that Apple bundle it with every Mac. The beauty of it was the language. Stacks were made of cards that were made of fields, objects, each of which had a dozen attributes that could be set and all of it could be directed with a simple and straightforward language. Easy, permissive and forgiving structure, still pretty powerful results. We had an external research site for Apple ATG, testing actual use of Apple IIGS vs Mac SE. Along the way, they ported Hypercard to the GS. It was a four hour port. I still have an archive of teacher and student coding projects done in Hypercard. The results of your code were tangible, graphical, and didnâ(TM)t blow up when there were errors. At the time the other k-12 coding options were BASIC, LOGO, Pascal⦠Hypercard was IMHO better for jumpstarting teaching coding than any of those.
https://cancel.fm/stuff/share/... [cancel.fm]
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Hypercard was basically an interface-first database app which let you build interfaces easily to do things with the records. You had a "stack" of "cards" and each card had properties. If you wanted to make your own custom address book (no one wanted to do this, in reference to your second sentence) or track the migratory habits of swallows, you could throw a bunch of fields on a page layout and boom you had a whatever tracking "application." It's been a while, but I remember mostly being able to add fields
Re: Pancreatic cancer? (Score:3)
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 was old (Score:1)
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You can get "cancer insurance" in the U.S. too. Aflac offers it.
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It appears that the issue is two-fold. Pancreatic cancer is not well understood and the pancreas is quite vital to maintaining life.
I did a search on the most common cancers and I found this: https://www.cancer.gov/types/c... [cancer.gov]
Cancer in the bladder, breast, colon, kidney, lung, skin, prostate, and more can be treated with removing all or part of that organ with the person still being able to survive, in part because some of this is redundant like having two kidneys and two lungs. People can live without a p
Self-care for cancer patients (Score:3)
What feeds cancer is sugar and glutamine. You can clamp down on sugar but glutamine is very hard to shut down -- ketogenic diet, periodic water fasting helps, and some hard to obtain pharmaceuticals help with managing glutamine levels to fight cancer. Dr. Thomas Seyfried is an authority in this area and his interventions have helped real cancer patients
This article describes methods to help your body heal cancer, in cooperation with standard medical care: https://enconsed.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
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Steve Jobs was exposed to cancer-causing "new car smell" every single day. In California, new cars had grace period to get license plates, and cars without plates could park in handicapped spaces without penalty, and Steve Jobs was a psychopath, so he had an arrangement with a car dealership for a regular new car without plates so he could park in handicapped spaces.
https://www.cultofmac.com/news... [cultofmac.com]
He will be missed (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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The thing about his negative LOC immediately endears him to me.
When I was working at a medical tech company management tried the same thing. Daily report of LOC. I had been hired to refactor and rewrite a terrible bloated piece of PHP hell into something more sane. I realised a lot of its problems had to do with the fact its algorithm was about 4 nested deep layers of for loops with an SQL in the middle (with injection vunls, because of course, PHP) So I refactored about 10 pages ino a page of code and a sl
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I had a coworker who dealt with that situation by double-spacing his code. A blank line on every other line.
Love that. I've done a lot of work on metrics and constantly have to explain to clients to think about what behaviors it will drive because we all are good at figuring out how to game them. When I worked at a big consulting firm billable hours were the key; most of my projects were fixed cost with prices high enough tha my actual hours vs billable ratio was less than one, and often a lot less. So when I was close to my target I'd give other team members hours if they were in danger of falling short so t
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Yes, I've worked at a company that basically said you had to have 40 billable hours a week. That is, all hours had to be billable to a client.
Come performance review time, and hey, no charge code. No one did it unless they worked overtime, because it wasn't billable. They quickly relented and changed it to everything had to have a charge code. This meant every time someone worked on something new or novel, project managers had to scramble to create a charge code for it
Probably the most unknown genius at Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Woz says there was none greater than Bill, and that he was honored to be able to work with him.
Also. (Score:1)
Amazing to see that soulless ghoul Blake Lively use Bill's death as an opportunity to sneak in commentary about her false accusation case. The shit stain has no class. Can't wait for her and Ryan to vanish into obscurity.
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He *expletive* co-founded General Magic with Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat, which was an Apple spinoff that basically invented the smartphone. Apple cannibalized their work for the iPhone and EDS for OnStar. You can watch the documentary about it on NetFlix and YouTube (look for General Magic).
Hypercard (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Not to in any way minimize Bill's most-significant contributions; but there was cross-pollination of a lot of ideas regarding information storage, indexing, and presentation around that time. Let's not forget, for example, Ted Nelson; who is still with us, BTW!
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Exactly. People seem to have forgotten about the Xanadu project.
Indeed!
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This is likely an implementation of the "memex" as envisioned by Vannevar Bush: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Bush envisioned a machine loaded with microfilm copies of books and other materials that could be reached by means of association than some hierarchical index. His vision of how such an information storage device would work was limited by the technology of the time. Memory was expensive but microfilm was relatively cheap. If there was a kind of searchable database in memory to associate differ
Hypercard could have been basis of internet (Score:2)
Similarly, Hypercard was a fascinating single user experience for hyperlinked content. I did some early hobby programming on it and was impressed how you could make something cool with it. But imagine if it would have offered seamless connection to other hypercard stacks on remote computers from the beginning, it could have changed the way
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Steve Jobs made a lot of good future-oriented decision for the first Mac. But he didn't build in networking from the start, which eh later acknowledged was an oversight. Similarly, Hypercard was a fascinating single user experience for hyperlinked content. I did some early hobby programming on it and was impressed how you could make something cool with it. But imagine if it would have offered seamless connection to other hypercard stacks on remote computers from the beginning, it could have changed the way we see the internet. Atkinson was indeed a genius... MacPaint, Quickdraw routines, Hypercard. Impressive!
No doubt. Killing HyperCard was a big mistake, IMHO, when you think of what could have been. I played with it on my ][gs. It was powerful and relatively intuitive, and had Apple moved forward could have been a major player in today's internet. Of course, that would have meant Apple would have had to expand it to Windows but doing so very well might have created the first cross platform browser. Given Jobs' focus on design, the net might be a vastly different experience had he pushed HyperCard developme
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I wrote bankruptcy filing software for my own use in the late 80s on hypercard. Some things it generated itself, and some it sent a mail merge file to word 5.1 (the last version that could simply use a text file as input rather than those bizarre inserts). In fairly short order, it ended up transferred to supercars, which could have multiple stacks open (but I never transitioned back when hypercard 2.0 came out. I suppose I could have scripted that, but . . .).
I thought about making a commercial project o
Principle designer? (Score:2)
> was principle designer of the Lisa's graphical user interface
I wonder what sort of principles did he design
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Good spot !
Wuck the Feb! (Score:2)
Hypercard influenced VB, one of the most most productive dev tools ever. We somehow de-evolved into bloated buggy learning-curve-heavy web stacks. Ooga Booga.
Most of the complaints about VB-like tools are fixable, but too few bothered to apply some R&D, instead throwing the baby out with the web water, giving us fucked up frameworks on top of the brain-damaged DOM and CSS. You humans are doing it wrong.
Git off my productive lawn, you wormy little buzzword fuckers!
Amiga had a HyperCard clone called AmigaVision (Score:3)
Amiga had a HyperCard clone called AmigaVision. It was pretty amazing and I believe it outlasted the original HyperCard.
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Microsoft had one called Access ;)