Bill Atkinson, Macintosh Pioneer and inventor of Hypercard, dies at 74

My first meeting Bill Atkinson was unforgettable. It was November 1983 and Reporting for Rolling StoneI had received access to the team on the Macintosh computer, which is scheduled to start next year at the beginning of next year. Everyone kept telling me: “Wait until you meet Bill and Andy” and referred to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two important authors of the Mac software. I wrote the following about the encounter in my book Insanely great:

I met Bill Atkinson first. As a big guy with the stubborn hair, a Pancho Villa cording and blazing blue eyes, he had the annoying intensity of Bruce Dern in one of his curves as an unshakable Vietnam veterinarian. Like everyone else in the room, he wore jeans and a T-shirt. “Do you want to see a mistake?” He asked me. He pulled me into his cabin and pointed to his Macintosh. Filling the screen was an incredibly detailed drawing of an insect. It was beautiful, something you could see on an expensive workstation in a research laboratory, but not on a PC. Atkinson laughed at his joke, then became very serious and spoke in an intense almost whisper who gave his words an awesome weight. “The barrier between words and pictures is broken,” he said. “So far the world of art has been a holy club. Like good China. Now it is for daily use.”

Atkinson was right. His contributions to the Macintosh were of crucial importance for this breakthrough, which he whispered to me in the Apple office, which was known to me on that day as Bandley 3. A few years later, he alone made another huge contribution to a program called Hypercard that shaped the World Wide Web. With all of this, he kept his energy and joie de vivre and became an inspiration for everyone who would change the world through code. On June 5, 2025, he died after a long illness. He was 74.

Atkinson had not planned to become a pioneer in personal computing. As a doctoral student, he studied computer science and neurobiology at the University of Washington. When he came across an Apple II in 1977, he fell in love and worked for the company that had built it a year later. He was employee number 51. In 1979 he belonged to the small group that led Steve Jobs to the Xerox Parc Research Lab and was knocked out by the graphics computer interface, which he saw there. It was his task to translate this futuristic technology to the consumer and to work on Apple’s Lisa project. He invented many of the conventions that continue to exist on today’s computers such as menus. Atkinson also created QuickDraw, a groundbreaking technology to draw objects efficiently on a screen. One of these objects was the “Rund-Rect” a box with rounded corners that would become part of the computer experience of everyone. Atkinson had opposed the idea Until jobs went through the block and saw all traffic signs and other objects with rounded corners.

When Jobs took over the other Apple project, which was inspired by the Parc technology, the Macintosh, he poached Atkinson, whose work had already influenced this product. Hertzfeld, which was responsible for the Mac interface, once explained to me the Lisa functions he had acquired for the Mac: “I took everything Bill Atkinson did and nothing else.” he said. Atkinson, who had disappointed at the high price of the Lisa, accepted the idea of ​​a more affordable version and began MacPaint, the program with which users would create art on the Bit -prescribed screen of the Mac.

After the start of the Mac, the team began to disguise itself. Atkinson had the title of Apple Fellow who gave him freedom to pursue passion projects. He started working on something that he called Magic Slate-a device with a high-resolution screen that weighed under a pound and a pen and controlled by a touchscreen. Basically, he disempowered the iPad 25 years earlier. But the technology was not ready to create something so miniaturized and powerful at an affordable price (Atkinson hoped that it would be so inexpensive that you could afford to lose six in a year and not to do it.) “I wanted Magic Slate to taste so much,” he told me once.