The man who programmed Apple's crown jewels: On the death of Bill Atkinson
Apple pioneer and nature photographer Bill Atkinson died at the beginning of June as a result of cancer. He was 74 years old.
Atkinson's company ID card from Apple Computer. He was employee #51.
(Image: Internet)
William Dana Atkinson's software had a significant impact on the early Apple years. Atkinson became famous for his work on QuickDraw, the basis for the graphical user interface of the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers. His legacy also includes MacPaint and Hypercard, a forerunner of the WWW hypertext system. Atkinson died on June 5.
Atkinson was born on March 17, 1951 in Ottumwa in the US state of Iowa, the third of seven children. The extended family spent a lot of time outdoors. A subscription to Arizona Highways magazine had a formative influence on the young Bill. He cut out the most beautiful nature photos and wallpapered his room with them
Professor Jef Raskin
He studied computer science and neurobiology, and his professor in computer science was Jef Raskin, one of the first employees of Apple Computer. It was Raskin who urged Bill Atkinson to join the company and provided him with a plane ticket to meet Steve Jobs.
As the 51st employee of the young company, Atkinson first programmed a Pascal version for the Apple II and then joined the team that was to develop the office computer Lisa, while Raskin developed a home computer with the code name Annie. This project resulted in the Macintosh.
In December 1979, Jobs offered Xerox Investment a share package worth one million US dollars and in return wanted to "look under the kimono" to see what Xerox was developing in its Palo Alto Research Center. The Apple team initially only got to see a short, superficial demo, for which Larry Tesler was responsible. Jobs was annoyed until Tesler was allowed to show how the pixels on the screen were controlled by bitmapping at a second meeting.
This demo was the catalyst for Atkinson's QuickDraw and the design of the graphical user interfaces for Lisa and the Macintosh. In his biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes of one of the "greatest industrial thefts of all time", which is not entirely true. The windows of the Xerox interface were angular and they opened side by side or one after the other. But Atkinson was convinced that they overlapped like on a desk, and Jobs wanted rounded window corners. This was realized in QuickDraw.
Along the way, Atkinson invented the double-click with the mouse and the pull-down menus – at Xerox, key combinations had to be pressed in addition to the mouse. In his book on the development of the Macinstosh, Steven Levy writes about Atkinson: "Actually, he was only supposed to reinvent the wheel, but in reality he completely reinvented it." QuickDraw was "the crown jewel in the whole Apple arsenal", recalls Macintosh developer Andy Hertzfeld.
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Atkinson eventually switched to the Macintosh team because he was dissatisfied with the office orientation of the Lisa project. Here he programmed the MacPaint painting software, for which he presented himself as an "artist and inventor" in a commercial. This was true, because with its palettes and brushes, MacPaint was an early digital art tool that was imitated by many of its successors.
The greatest artistic influence on Atkinson was a dreamy vision, which he described in an interview with Mondo 2000 as a transgalactic interconnectedness of enlightened minds, where all ideas "seep upwards, from information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom." The result was a software called Hypercard, with which hypermedia documents could be created in the form of so-called stacks. This form of multimedia was temporarily favored and collected by the US Library of Congress until it was displaced by the hypertext of the World Wide Web. Today it is maintained by the Internet Archive.
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General Magic
In 1990, Bill Atkinson left Apple and founded the company General Magic with his friend Andy Hertzfeld and investor Marc Porat to develop small information systems for everyday use. The applications of the Magic Communicating Applications Platform (Magic Cap) were to communicate with each other via a dial-up platform called Telescript. General Magic was to supply the operating and network system as well as the applications, but it took quite a long time before all the components were available. When Motorola came onto the market in 1995 with the Envoy based on Magic Cap and IBM's data network, the train had left the station.
After the demise of General Magic, Bill Atkinson devoted himself to his second great passion: nature photography, which he had pursued as a hobby for 35 years, became his new profession, which he pursued with great dedication. His first book, "Within the Stone", was published in 2004 with macro shots of polished stone surfaces.
Atkinson made his last public appearance in 2024, when the 40th birthday of the Macintosh was celebrated. In October 2024, he announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He sailed the Caribbean until shortly before his death. Atkinson died surrounded by his family.
(wpl)
