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

My first meeting With Bill Atkinson he was unforgettable. It was November 1983 and Report for rolling stoneI had gained access to the Team Building The Macintosh Computer, scheduled to launch at the beginning of the following year. Everyone continued to tell me: “Wait to meet Bill and Andy”, referring to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two key writers of the Mac software. Here’s what I wrote about the meeting in my book, Madly exceptional:

I met Bill Atkinson before. A high type with unruly hair, a mustache of Villa Bencho and burning blue eyes, had the unnerving intensity of Bruce Dern in one of its shifts as a reckless veterinarian in Vietnam. Like all the others in the room, he wore jeans and a shirt. “Do you want to see a bug?” He asked me. He pulled me in his cubicolo and indicated his macintosh. Filling the screen was an incredibly detailed design of an insect. It was nice, something you could see on an expensive workstation in a research laboratory, but not on a personal computer. Atkinson laughed at his joke, then he became very serious, speaking in an intense neighbor who gave his words a reverent weight. “The barrier between words and images is broken,” he said. “Until now the world of art has been a sacred club. Like a beautiful China. Now it is for daily use.”

Atkinson was right. His contribution to the Macintosh was fundamental for that turning point that whispered to the Apple office known as Bandley 3 that day. A few years later, he would have made another giant contribution with a program called Hypercard, who chaired the World Wide Web. In all this, he maintained his energy and Joie de Vivre, and became a source of inspiration for all those who would have changed the world through the code. On June 5, 2025, he died after a long illness. He was 74 years old.

Atkinson had not planned to become a pioneer in the personal calculation. As a graduate student, he studied IT and Neurobiology at the University of Washington. But when he met an Apple II in 1977, he fell in love and went to work for the company that built her a year later. It was the number of employees 51 It has become its task translating that futuristic technology into the consumer, working on the Lisa project by Apple. In the process, he invented many of the conventions that still persist on today’s computers, such as menus bars. Atkinson has also created QuickDraw, a revolutionary technology to efficiently draw objects on a screen. One of these objects was the “round rectum”, a box with rounded corners that would become part of everyone’s computer experience. Atkinson he had resisted the idea Until Jobs made him walk for the isolated and see all the road signals and other objects with rounded corners.

When Jobs took on the other Apple project inspired by Parc technology, the Macintosh, he put ATKinson into shirts, whose work had already influenced that product. Hertzfeld, who was responsible for the Mac interface, once explained to me the characteristics of Lisa who had appropriated for the Mac: “Whatever Bill Atkinson did, I took and nothing else”. he said. Atkinson, who had been disenchanted at the high price of Lisa, embraced the idea of ​​a cheaper version and started writing Macpaint, the program that would have authorized users to create art on the screen mapped to Mac’s bit.

After the launch of the Mac, the team started to reveal. Atkinson had the title of Apple Fellow, who gave him the freedom to pursue passion projects. He started working on something he called Magic Slate, a device with a high resolution screen that weighed under a pound and could be controlled by a stylus and flows on a touchscreen. Basically, he was planning the iPad for 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 cheap that you could allow you to lose six in a year and not to be disturbed.) “I wanted magical slate so bad that I could taste it”, he said once.