My first meeting with a atkinson bill shall not be forgotten. November is November 1983, and Reporting for Rolling RockI have gained access to the Macintosh computer building team, which is set to launch early next year. Everyone keeps talking to me, “wait until you meet the bill and andy,” aiming at Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two main writers in Mac software. Here’s what I wrote about the encounter in my book, Best News:
I met Bill Atkinson first. A long accompany with an unreal hair, a flock villa mustache, and burning blue eyes, she has unnerving bruce energy into a non-drunk vetnam vet. Like the rest of the room, he wears jeans and a t-shirt. “Do you want to see a bug?” He asked me. He took me to his cubicle and appointed his Macintosh. Filling screen is a more detailed drawing of an insect. It’s great, something you can see in an expensive workstation in a research lab, but not on a personal computer. Atkinson laughed at his joke, then it was very intense, talking to a severe habel that gives his words a polite weight. “The barrier between words and pictures is broken,” he said. “Till now the art of art is a sacred club. Like good China. Now it is for daily use.”
Atkinson is right. His contributions to Macintosh critical to that collapse he whispered to me at the Apple Office known as Bandley 3 that day. A few years ago, he would not make another giant contribution with a program called Hypercard, which seized the World Wide Web. Through all, he continued his strength and Joie de Vivre, and became an inspiration for everyone to change the world by code. On June 5, 2025, he died after high disease. He is 74.
Atkinson is not planning to be a pioneer in personal computing. As a graduate student, he studied computer science and neurobiology at the University of Washington. But when he experienced an Apple II in 1977, he loved, and worked for the company building this one year ago. He was the employee number 51 it has become his job to translate that the futuristic technology of the consumer, is working on Apple’s Lisa project. In the process, he invented many of the conventions still on computers today, like the menu bars. Atkinson also made QuickDraw, a groundbreaking technology that will prompt things on a screen. One of the things is “round-rect” – a box with round corners to be part of the computing experience at all. Atkinson prevents the idea Until he was made by jobs walking around the block and see all signs of traffic and other things with round corners.
If jobs taken by other Apple Projects inspired by Parc Technology, Macintosh, he referred to ATKINSON, whose work has influenced the product. Hertzfeld, in charge of the Mac interface, explained to me in the Lisa parts of Mac: “Whatever Bill Atkinson did, and nothing else.” He said. Atkinson, angrily at a high price of Lisa price, accepts the idea of a more inexpensive version, and begins to write Mac-Mac-MaC’s Mac’s Mac.
Then launched on the Mac, the team’s unreal begins. Atkinson has an apple title, which gives him the freedom of maintaining enthusiasm projects. He started working on something he called magic slate-a device with a high-resolution screen weighed under a pound and becoming controlled by a touch screen. Mainly, he designed iPad 25 years early. But technology is not ready to do something more miniaturized and powerful on a cheap price (the atkinson hopes you never lose six years I can look at it, “I used to tell me before.
