My first assembly with Invoice Atkinson was unforgettable. It was November 1983, and reporting for Rolling Stone, I had gained entry to the workforce constructing the Macintosh laptop, scheduled to launch early the subsequent 12 months. Everybody stored telling me, “Wait until you meet Invoice and Andy,” referring to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two key writers of the Mac’s software program. Right here’s what I wrote in regards to the encounter in my ebook, Insanely Great:
I met Invoice Atkinson first. A tall fellow with unruly hair, a Pancho Villa moustache, and blazing blue eyes, he had the unnerving depth of Bruce Dern in considered one of his turns as an unhinged Vietnam vet. Like everybody else within the room, he wore denims and a T-shirt. “Do you need to see a bug?” he requested me. He pulled me into his cubicle and pointed to his Macintosh. Filling the display screen was an extremely detailed drawing of an insect. It was stunning, one thing you would possibly see on an costly workstation in a analysis lab, however not on a private laptop. Atkinson laughed at his joke, then acquired very severe, speaking in an intense near-whisper that gave his phrases a reverential weight. “The barrier between phrases and footage is damaged,” he mentioned. “Till now the world of artwork has been a sacred membership. Like wonderful china. Now it’s for each day use.”
Atkinson was proper. His contributions to the Macintosh had been crucial to that breakthrough he’d whispered to me on the Apple workplace often known as Bandley 3 that day. Just a few years later, he would singlehandedly make one other big contribution with a program known as Hypercard, which presaged the World Huge Internet. Via all of it, he retained his power and joie de vivre, and have become an inspiration for all who would change the world via code. On June 5, 2025, he died after a protracted sickness. He was 74.
Atkinson hadn’t deliberate on changing into a pioneer in private computing. As a graduate pupil, he studied laptop science and neurobiology on the College of Washington. However when he encountered an Apple II in 1977, he fell in love, and went to work for the corporate that constructed it a 12 months later. He was worker quantity 51. In 1979, he was among the many small group that Steve Jobs led to the Xerox PARC analysis lab and was blown away by the graphic laptop interface he noticed there. It turned his job to translate that futuristic expertise to the buyer, engaged on Apple’s Lisa undertaking. Within the course of, he invented lots of the conventions that also persist on at this time’s computer systems, like menu bars. Atkinson additionally created QuickDraw, a groundbreaking expertise to effectively draw objects on a display screen. A kind of objects was the “Spherical-Rect”—a field with rounded corners that may change into a part of everybody’s computing expertise. Atkinson had resisted the idea till Jobs made him stroll across the block and see all of the site visitors indicators and different objects with rounded corners.
When Jobs took over the opposite Apple undertaking impressed by PARC expertise, the Macintosh, he poached Atkinson, whose work had already influenced that product. Hertzfeld, who was in command of the Mac interface, as soon as defined to me the Lisa options he’d appropriated for the Mac: “Something Invoice Atkinson did, I took, and nothing else.” he mentioned. Atkinson, who had change into disenchanted on the Lisa’s excessive price ticket, embraced the thought of a extra inexpensive model, and started writing MacPaint, this system that may empower customers to create artwork on the Mac’s bit-mapped display screen.
After the Mac launched, the workforce started to unravel. Atkinson had the title of Apple Fellow, which gave him the liberty to pursue ardour initiatives. He started work on one thing he known as Magic Slate—a tool with a high-resolution display screen that weighed beneath a pound and may very well be managed by a stylus and swipes on a contact display screen. Mainly, he was designing the iPad 25 years early. However the expertise wasn’t able to create one thing so miniaturized and highly effective at an inexpensive value (Atkinson hoped it could be so cheap you could possibly afford to lose six in a 12 months and never be bothered.) “I wished Magic Slate so dangerous I might style it,” he as soon as advised me.