Bill Atkinson has died
67 comments
·June 7, 2025dkislyuk
rjsw
I think the difference between the Apple and Xerox approach may be more complicated than the people at PARC not knowing how to do this. The Alto doesn't have a framebuffer, each window has its own buffer and the microcode walks the windows to work out what to put on each scanline.
JKCalhoun
Not doubting that, but what is the substantive difference here? Does the fact that there is a screen buffer on the Mac facilitate clipping that is otherwise not possible on the Alto?
aaronharder
More details here: https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html
lambdaone
It allows the Mac to use far less RAM to display overlapping windows, and doesn't require any extra hardware. Individual regions are refreshed independently of the rest of the screen, with occlusion, updates, and clipping managed automatically,
mjevans
Reminds me of a GPU's general workflow. (like the sibling comment, 'isn't that the obvious way this is done'? Different drawing areas being hit by 'firmware' / 'software' renderers?)
null
jajko
Pretty awesome story, but also with a bit of dark lining. Of course any owner, and triple that for Jobs, loves over-competent guys who work themselves to the death, here almost literally.
But that's not a recipe for personal happiness for most people, and most of us would not end up contributing revolutionary improvements even if done so. World needs awesome workers, and we also need ie awesome parents or just happy balanced content people (or at least some part of those).
1123581321
Pretty much. Most of us have creative itches to scratch that make us a bit miserable if we never get to pursue them, even if given a comfortable life. It’s circumstantial whether we get to pursue them as entrepreneurs or employees. The users or enjoyers of our work benefit either way.
90s_dev
[flagged]
JKCalhoun
When I was on the ColorSync team at Apple we, the engineers, got an invite to his place-in-the-woods one day.
I knew who he was at the time, but for some reason I felt I was more or less beholden to conversing only about color-related issues and how they applied to a computer workflow. Having retired, I have been kicking myself for some time not just chatting with him about ... whatever.
He was at the time I met him very in to a kind of digital photography. My recollection was that he had a high-end drum scanner and was in fact scanning film negatives (medium format camera?) and then going with a digital workflow from that point on. I remember he was excited about the way that "darks" could be captured (with the scanner?). A straight analog workflow would, according to him, cause the darks to roll off (guessing the film was not the culprit then, perhaps the analog printing process).
He excitedly showed us on his computer photos he took along the Pacific ocean of large rock outcroppings against the ocean — pointing out the detail that you could see in the shadow of the rocks. He was putting together a coffee table book of his photos at the time.
I have to say that I mused at the time about a wealthy, retired, engineer who throws money at high end photo gear and suddenly thinks they're a photographer. I think I was weighing his "technical" approach to photography vs. a strictly artistic one. Although, having learned more about Ansel Adams technical chops, perhaps for the best photographers there is overlap.
WillAdams
Some notable stories from Folklore.org:
https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html --- something to bring up whenever lines of code as a metric is put forward
https://www.folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html --- story of how the Macintosh Finder came to be
https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html --- surviving a car accident
LorenDB
The lines of code story is a timeless classic.
90s_dev
> He thought and wrote "-2000 lines". Management stopped asking Bill to fill out the form.
This lesson stuck with me for years. Final results alone are measurable, not productivity.
garciasn
Score code on line count and runtime golf. Shorter, faster, and fastest time to completion is best.
Code that’s 4K and took slightly less time to write but runs slightly faster than code that’s 400 bytes that took another 30m to write still doesn’t get the best score.
matthewn
In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not just programmers) the "bicycle for the mind" that Steve Jobs spoke of. I think this is the timeline that Atkinson envisioned, and I wish I lived in it. We've lost a true visionary. Memory eternal!
asveikau
Maybe there's some sense of longing for a tool that's similar today, but there's no way of knowing how much hypercard did have the impact you are talking about. For example many of us reading here experienced HyperCard. It planted seeds in our future endeavors.
I remember in elementary school, I had some computer lab classes where the whole class worked in hypercard on some task. Multiply that by however many classrooms did something like that in the 80s and 90s. That's a lot of brains that can be influenced and have been.
We can judge it as a success in its own right, even if it never entered the next paradigm or never had quite an equivalent later on.
lambdaone
HyperCard was undoubtedly the inspiration for Visual Basic, which for quite some time dominated the bespoke UI industry in the same way web frameworks do today.
jkestner
Word. This is the Papert philosophy of constructionism, learning to think by making that so many of us still carry. I’m still trying to build software-building software. We do live in that timeline; it’s just unevenly distributed.
cortesoft
HyperCard was the foundation of my programming career. I treated the HyperCard Bible like an actual Bible.
kadushka
inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove
LLMs inspired vibe coding - that’s our timeline.
Arathorn
It’s ironic that the next graphical programming environment similar to Hypercard was probably Flash - and it obviously died too.
What actually are the best successors now, at least for authoring generic apps for the open web? (Other than vibe coding things)
jx47
I think that would be Decker (https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker). Not my project but I found it some time ago when I searched for Hypercard successors. The neat thing is that it works in the browser.
jchrisa
I haven't posted it here yet b/c it's not show ready, but we have been building this vision -- I like to think of it as an e-bike for the mind.
We had a lot of fun last night with Vibecode Karaoke, where you code an app at the same time as you sing a song.
davisr
I first met Bill over video-chat during 2020 and we got to know each other a bit. He later sent me a gift that changed my life. We hadn't talked for the past couple years, but I know he experienced "death" before and was as psychologically prepared as anyone could be. I have no doubt that he handled the biggest trip of his life with grace. We didn't always see eye-to-eye when it came to software, but we did share a mutual interest in the unknown, and the meaning of it all. Meet ya on the other side, Bill.
happycube
CHM posted MacPaint and QuickDraw source: https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour...
fotta
Wow. Rest in peace Bill. I think he is deserving of a black stripe up top.
kapitanjakc
I've read stories about him on folklore.
He was a good man and great engineer.
RIP
wesnerm2
Atkinson's HyperCard was released in 1987, before the widespread adoption of the web. HyperCard introduced concepts like interactive stacks of cards, scripting, and linking, which were later adopted and expanded upon in the web. Robert Cailliau, who assisted Tim Berners-Lee in developing the first web browser, was influenced by HyperCard's hyperlink concept.
gdubs
Atkinson's work is so influential. From his contributions to the Macintosh team, to HyperCard, Bill was an inspiration to me and showed the power of merging art & technology.
Thanks for everything, Bill — Rest in Peace.
agumonkey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_dithering and so many other things
rip
gavmor
If you haven't, check out the documentary[0] on General Magic which Bill co-founded in 1990. Among the more remarkable scenes in there is when a member of the public seems perplexed by the thought that they would even want to "check email from Times Square."
An unthinkable future, but they thought it. And yet, most folks have never heard of General Magic.
From Walter Isaacson's _Steve Jobs_:
> One of Bill Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of course, on a computer screen there are no layers of pixels underneath the pixels that you see, so there are no windows actually lurking underneath the ones that appear to be on top. To create the illusion of overlapping windows requires complex coding that involves what are called “regions.” Atkinson pushed himself to make this trick work because he thought he had seen this capability during his visit to Xerox PARC. In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were amazed that he had done so. “I got a feeling for the empowering aspect of naïveté”, Atkinson said. “Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.” He was working so hard that one morning, in a daze, he drove his Corvette into a parked truck and nearly killed himself. Jobs immediately drove to the hospital to see him. “We were pretty worried about you”, he said when Atkinson regained consciousness. Atkinson gave him a pained smile and replied, “Don’t worry, I still remember regions.”