My first meeting I will never forget it with Bill Atkinson. It was November 1983 Report on Rolling StoneI went to the team building Macintosh computers and was scheduled to be released early next year. Everyone kept saying, “Wait until I meet Bill and Andy.” It mentions two important authors of Mac’s software, Atkinson and Andy Herzfeld. This is what I wrote about my book encounters, So amazing:
I first met Bill Atkinson. A tall companion with unruly hair, Pancho Villa’s mustache and blue eyes, he felt Bruce Dahn’s unsettling in one of his turns as a hinged Vietnamese veterinarian. Like everyone else in the room, he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. “Want to see a bug?” he asked me. He pulled me towards the cubicle and pointed at his Macintosh. Filling the screen was a very detailed picture of the insect. It’s beautiful and you might see it on an expensive workstation in your lab, but not on your personal computer. Atkinson laughed at his jokes, then became very serious and spoke with intense closeness, honoring his words. “The barrier between words and photography is broken,” he said. “Until now, the art world has been a sacred club. Like great China. Now for daily use.”
Atkinson was right. His contribution to MacIntosh was important to that breakthrough he whispered to me at the Apple office known as Bandeley 3 that day. A few years later, he made another enormous contribution on his own with a program called Hypercard, which booked the World Wide Web. Through it, he retained his energy and Jois de Vivre and became an inspiration for everyone who changed the world through the code. On June 5th, 2025, he passed away after a long illness. He was 74 years old.
Atkinson had no plans to become a pioneer in personal computing. As a graduate student, he studied computer science and neurobiology at the University of Washington. However, when he met the Apple II in 1977, he fell in love and went to work for the company that built it a year later. He was employee number 51. In 1979 he was one of the small group Steve Jobs led to Xerox Park Research Labs, and was blown away by the graphics computer interface he saw there. It became his job to translate that futuristic technology into consumers and work on Apple’s LISA project. Along the way, he invented many practices that still remain on today’s computers, such as menu bars. Atkinson also created QuickDraw, a groundbreaking technology for efficiently drawing objects on screens. One of these objects was “rounded”. This is a box with rounded corners that will become part of everyone’s computing experience. Atkinson I resisted this idea Until Job walks him around the block, looking at all the traffic signs and other objects with round corners.
He poached Atkinson when Jobs took over other Apple projects inspired by the Macintosh, a PARC technology. Hertzfeld, who was in charge of the MAC interface, explained the features of Lisa that were once used to be used on Macs. He said. Disillusioned with Lisa’s high price tags, Atkinson embraced the idea of ​​a more affordable version and began creating MacPaint, a program that allows users to create art on the bitmap screens of Macs.
After MAC started up, the team began to understand. Atkinson had the title of Apple Fellow, which gave him the freedom to pursue a passion project. He began working on what is called the Magic Rate. This is a device with a high-resolution screen that is controlled by the stylus with a weight of less than pounds and allows you to swipe on the touchscreen. Essentially, he was designing his iPad 25 years earlier. However, the technology wasn’t ready to create something that small and powerful at an affordable price (Atkinson hoped he could afford to lose six in a year and not be bothered).
