Obit Invoice Atkinson, broadly acclaimed as maybe probably the most good pc programmer ever, has succumbed to pancreatic most cancers at 74.
Atkinson’s household announced the news on Fb on Sunday.
William Dana Atkinson was one of many core individuals on the groups that created the Lisa after which Macintosh computer systems at Apple within the late Seventies and early Eighties. He was one of the vital vital and influential pc programmers who has ever lived. It’s no exaggeration to say that all pc UIs designed within the final 40 years have been formed and influenced by Atkinson’s brilliance and originality.
He dropped out of a doctorate in neuroscience to join Apple in 1978. He grew to become worker # 51. In 2018, he stated:
Because the weekend when the information first broke, a exceptional vary of tributes to the person and his work have appeared. For the Reg FOSS desk, one of many issues that has significantly struck us is the vary of various features of Atkinson’s creativity that resonated with totally different individuals.
As an example, these working primarily on-line, similar to TechCrunch’s Antony Ha, call out HyperCard. Atkinson designed and wrote HyperCard, which launched the broader world to the idea of hyperlinks as invented by Ted Nelson for his Xanadu hypertext system. Hypercard made it simple to create “stacks” of paperwork and navigate by them by clicking on hyperlinks. As The Register has described greater than as soon as, it is inspired JavaScript recreations and parts of the Windows 10 UI, however most importantly of all it impressed the creators of the World Large Internet. It’s particularly talked about within the original proposal. Atkinson himself described the inspiration for Hypercard as a 1985 LSD trip.
MacPaint 1.0
Anybody who creates or edits photos on computer systems makes use of instruments that observe within the footsteps of an earlier Invoice Atkinson app: he wrote MacPaint. Between it and his earlier version, LisaSketch, this launched concepts like software palettes, which grew to become toolbars; the lasso software to pick objects; zoomed-in pixel modifying, which Atkinson referred to as FatBits; and the paint-bucket fill software, amongst many different issues.
Programmers who know his work nod with respect to lower-level stuff. The story of Apple’s go to to Xerox, the place the Xerox Alto graphical workstation impressed the Apple Lisa’s overlapping windows, is well-known. What’s much less effectively understood is that Smalltalk might solely write or draw into one window, the topmost. It was inconceivable to replace the contents of background home windows. Atkinson was on that go to, however he did not know that. He simply assumed the Smalltalk workforce should have solved that, and all he needed to do was work out how. He referred to as his ensuing algorithm areas and after a critical 1982 automobile accident and head accidents, Atkinson’s first phrases to his visiting boss have been “Don’t worry, Steve, I still remember how to do regions.”
Apple LisaProject
Atkinson wrote the low-level graphical routines that grew to become LisaDraw and later, optimized even additional, the Macintosh’s QuickDraw. Within the course of, Atkinson steadily invented most of the instruments that comprise and outline the trendy GUI: menu bars, window title bars, rearranging home windows with drag and drop, and extra. He documented his incremental artistic course of with dozens of Polaroid photos. Compared, the GUI of Smalltalk-76 or Xerox’s industrial Star workstations is unusual and unfamiliar, because the Darkstar emulator’s screenshots show.
Decrease-level nonetheless, he’s remembered for his remarkably environment friendly dithering algorithm, which you’ll be able to try here.
As “Apple acolyte” Steven Levy wrote in Rolling Stone, Atkinson additionally introduced Burrell Smith, designer of the unique Macintosh {hardware}, to the project. In his e-book Insanely Nice, Levy described the approaching up with areas:
Not like this vulture, Levy knew Atkinson personally, and we discovered his Wired obituary touching.
The New York Times obituary has some quotes that convey how individuals who knew his work noticed it. Apple colleague Steve Perlman stated *”Taking a look at his code was like trying on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. His code was exceptional. It’s what made the Macintosh attainable.”
Atkinson persuaded Apple to spin off its radical Paradigm project as a separate firm, and left Apple in 1990 to co-found Basic Magic. It developed the Magic Cap – basically one thing like a smartphone, however a decade too early. Its website continues to be on-line and you’ll run the software in emulation at the moment.
In 2007 he came out of semi-retirement to work with Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins’s AI startup Numenta, saying “What Numenta is doing is extra basically vital to society than the non-public pc and the rise of the Web.”
Later in his life, he grew to become an completed nature photographer. In 2004, he published a book of maximum close-up mineral pictures referred to as Throughout the Stone. In 2009, he wrote an app to electronically ship postcards: it is referred to as PhotoCard. You may obtain photos from the e-book and his different pictures on BillAtkinson.com.
A 12 months and a half in the past, the Pc Historical past Museum hosted a panel discussion titled Insanely Great for the Mac’s 40th birthday. Its two hours include many spirited contributions from Atkinson.
He introduced his sickness on Facebook in late 2024, saying:
He married Jingwen Cai in January 2023. As his household stated, “He’s survived by his spouse, two daughters, stepson, stepdaughter, two brothers, 4 sisters, and canine, Poppy.”
This vulture discovered of Atkinson’s passing from a post on Daring Fireball. We can’t higher John Gruber’s closing phrases:
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