Bill Atkinson, RIP
We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by family. We will miss him greatly, and he will be missed by many of you, too. He was a remarkable person, and the world will be forever different because he lived in it.
One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history. If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here’s just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware.
See also: Silicon Valley Pioneers and The Famous Computer Cafe Part 1 and Part 2 (via Matt Sephton).
Previously:
- Investigating MacPaint’s Source Code
- First MacPaint and MacWrite Public Demo
- Joining Apple Computer 40 Years Ago
- Andy Hertzfeld’s Videos
- Leaving NeXT for General Magic
- Pascal at Apple
- Bill Atkinson Interview
- TidBITS’s Favorite April Fools Jokes
- MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Code
Update (2025-06-09): Tim Cook:
We are deeply saddened by the passing of Bill Atkinson. He was a true visionary whose creativity, heart, and groundbreaking work on the Mac will forever inspire us. Our thoughts are with his loved ones.
It’s WWDC time, so I didn’t expect Apple to take over their homepage with an Atkinson tribute. But a mention there would have been nice. Maybe put him above the Ted Lasso ad for a few days? It will be interesting to see whether they edited something into the keynote for today.
Bill Atkinson was one of the most brilliant, imaginative, and compelling people I ever had the privilege to work with. His vision touched every device you use today. And his heart, his open love and humanity, exceeded all of that.
Here’s Bill Atkinson (and rest of team) answering questions right after the Macintosh was debuted at the Boston Computer Society in 1984 starting at 28:25 - he demos MacPaint and more. May his memory be a blessing!
I’ll never forget the hours he spent with me at Foo Camp years ago, explaining all manner of things re: graphics.
What an interesting, interested person he was.
We in the tech world owe him a lot.
Amy:
Vale Bill Atkinson. HyperCard is always a part of the history of Apple. Playing around with it in High School was part of what got me into software development.
I don’t have a lot of heroes, but Bill Atkinson was one of them.
I had the good fortune of meeting him while we were both working on our first iPad apps. He was as gracious, smart, curious, and funny as you’d think.
I remember seeing Bill Atkinson at WWDC. It was like a god had just walked into the room.
I spent a lot of time in the late ’90s messing with old Macs, which meant that Bill Atkinson’s name and work came across my screen long before I had access to the Internet. Considering that the original Macintosh had severe technological constraints to keep it affordable, Atkinson made the most of the resources available, particular in the graphical side of things. He gave us the “marching ants” selection box, FatBits, MacPaint, the menu bar (!), QuickDraw, and HyperCard. One of the most beautiful contributions, however, has to be his dithering algorithm, a way to take high-resolution color images and draw them with only black and white pixels—if you want to see how this works for yourself, BitCam by The Iconfactory is an excellent homage on iOS.
kvImageConvert_DitherAtkinson remains one of my favorite APIs that I’ve added in the last two decades. A+ dithering, would apply to grayscale image.
It’s a simple algorithm, but making it performant on modern graphics hardware is hard.
I mourn the death of Bill Atkinson. But I also celebrate his life! We all benefited from his work, and none more than me.
And while the standard adage is “Never meet your heroes”, in this case that’s nonsense. The few times I met him were an absolute delight.
he was a delight the times I met up with him during WWDC.
Met him there in 2010 and made a point to tell him I’d not be a programmer now if not for him.
I only met him once, in a non-computing context, when he came to do a book signing at Stacey’s Books in San Francisco (RIP) for his book “Within the Stone”, and spoke about how he worked with his Japanese printers to push the state of the art in color reproduction possible using their printing process, using bespoke software he of course wrote himself.
Bill was always a keen photographer, even in the days of the Macintosh, e.g. Thunderscan.
After leaving Apple in 1990, Atkinson co-founded General Magic with Marc Porat and Andy Hertzfeld, attempting to create personal communicators before smartphones existed. Wikipedia notes that in 2007, he joined Numenta, an AI startup, declaring their work on machine intelligence “more fundamentally important to society than the personal computer and the rise of the Internet.”
In his later years, Atkinson pursued nature photography with the same artistry he’d brought to programming. His 2004 book “Within the Stone” featured close-up images of polished rocks that revealed hidden worlds of color and pattern.
How much of a HyperCard nerd am I? Yes.
Had the honor to talk with him several times over the years. He’d often hold court in the press rooms at Apple events and regale us with stories about early life at Apple and making the software that made the Mac work.
RIP to an all-time great.
So much of my early interaction with computers was shaped by Bill Atkinson. I can’t count the number of hours I spent on our Mac 512Ke in MacPaint (the first app I ever used) and later in HyperCard. The way those tools captivated me has strongly influenced my eventual career path as an app developer.
When I was a 10 year old kid or so, living in a country that seemed so distant in every way from California where all the cool things were being made, HyperCard was the trigger that made me understand I could write my own graphical, complex, Mac-feeling apps. I never stopped since then. No other set of ones and zeros was so important for my career and life.
I never met him, so don’t know who he was directly, but his insights and efforts had a huge effect - indirectly anyway - on me. I appreciate his mind and what he shared into the world. Hypercard, in particular - and I still see people enthused and trying to replicate aspects of it. A true bicycle for the mind.
Amongst all the other great things than Bill Atkinson made, I wouldn’t have met my wife if it wasn’t for Hypercard!
i wish i could convey how jaw dropping this macpaint demo was.
all of this was totally new. outside of small xerox demos to a handful of people, no one had seen anything like it.
all of these little pixel editing tools that seem ho hum today — all of that was brand new.
look at how utterly smooth the mouse worked.
plus the mouse, menus, fonts, icons, windows, buttons, scrolling… all new.
so much of the trajectory of my life was altered by this one person’s amazing creations.
So, Bill Atkinson is probably the reason I stuck with computers, and definitely the reason I wound up on Macs. I’d done bits of programming before I stumbled across HyperCard (BASIC, 6502 Assembler, Pascal, shell scripting, blah blah blah—even smidgens of FORTRAN and COBOL) but it was always with disinterest: I just wanted to do a thing, and if I had to program to do it…sigh, fine. I couldn’t wait to put the task behind me.
But HyperCard…HyperCard made programming accessible and fun. And while HyperCard (and HyperTalk) had distinct limitations and shortcomings, it was amazing what it could be pushed to do—and I enjoyed doing it, which is something I cannot say of *any* development environment I’ve worked with since.
I worked on games and educational titles built in HyperCard, and I created heaps of specialty and in-house systems (some of which were running until very recently). For years I ran a specialized web crawler that was (yep) built in HyperCard. Large parts of the backend for TidBITS were glued together with HyperCard. And no, none of this was rock solid, but it was very rare that HyperCard was the piece that failed.
Of course, Bill Atkinson’s contributions to the Mac, to computing, and the world were much larger than HyperCard. He was a giant, and I’m privileged to have stood on a tiny portion of one of his shoulders. Thank you.
The time the Lisa team visited the CS Department at Brown back in the day was incredibly inspiring to those of us working on early GUIs. Bill was super smart and gracious. RIP.
He literally was the reason I got into HCI.
I never met the man, but I bought my first Mac in 1985, worked at Apple for almost 10 years, and I can honestly say that there are only about half a dozen things that have had as great an influence on my life as the products and the ethos he helped bring to life.
The impact of Bill’s contributions is immeasurable. Although he worked alongside other early members of the Lisa and Macintosh teams, everything I find suggests that he wrote the Mac’s QuickDraw graphics engine and the initial versions of MacPaint and HyperCard almost single-handedly. It’s almost incomprehensible that one person could have created so much of such import in a relatively short span of time.
[…]
While I was never enough of a graphics person to get much from MacPaint, it introduced the bitmap editing paradigm to the mass market and heavily influenced Adobe Photoshop. HyperCard, on the other hand, changed my life. It was the reason TidBITS came into being (see “TidBITS History,” 18 April 1994), and some of the impetus for Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the World Wide Web stemmed from a desire to provide distributed, cross-machine linking and multi-user access in a hypertext system—capabilities that HyperCard lacked.
Everyone kept telling me, “Wait till you meet Bill and Andy,” referring to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two key writers of the Mac’s software. Here’s what I wrote about the encounter in my book, Insanely Great:
I met Bill Atkinson first. A tall fellow with unruly hair, a Pancho Villa moustache, and blazing blue eyes, he had the unnerving intensity of Bruce Dern in one of his turns as an unhinged Vietnam vet. Like everyone else in the room, he wore jeans and a T-shirt. “Do you want to see a bug?” he asked me. He pulled me into his cubicle and pointed to his Macintosh. Filling the screen was an incredibly detailed drawing of an insect. It was beautiful, something you might see on an expensive workstation in a research lab, but not on a personal computer. Atkinson laughed at his joke, then got very serious, talking in an intense near-whisper that gave his words a reverential weight. “The barrier between words and pictures is broken,” he said. “Until now the world of art has been a sacred club. Like fine china. Now it’s for daily use.”
To fans of Apple and the Macintosh, he was a hero who made technology delightful, proving that one coder’s vision could change the world.
With the news of the passing of Bill Atkinson a few days ago, I've been drawn down some truly and insanely great rabbit holes of information and fun clips about the man who invented so much of the computing we now take for granted today.
I was actually thinking of old QuickDraw a week ago while I was mowing the yard. No joke, my mind wandered into realizing that the most efficient mowing path is a roundrect.
I spent so much time using 680x0-based Macs and reading about the design choices for the ROM and built-in drawing routines that Atkinson’s stuff made a profound impression on me even before folklore.org was a thing, and of course I know most of the anecdotes involving him by heart (especially the lines of code one).
Bill Atkinson's HyperCard was an amazing piece of software that taught me so much about programming without having to get a degree in it!
In honor of Bill Atkinson, I’ve been reading the QuickDraw source code released by CHM and writing a little C implementation of his Region structure, which was an incredibly elegant solution to a problem so many people working on window systems never even realized they had.
Bill Atkinson’s passing the week before WWDC is an unfortunate coincidence, but maybe it’ll help reframe Apple’s enduring legacy on modern computing at a time when the company’s leadership has, without question, lost the fucking plot.
everyone knows you couldn’t use QuickDraw in 1985 without paying the Core Technology Fee.
Toward the end of the day, Steve took me aside and told me that any hot new technology I read about was actually two years old. “There is a lag time between when something is invented, and when it is available to the public. If you want to make a difference in the world, you have to be ahead of that lag time. Come to Apple where you can invent the future and change millions of people’s lives.”
Update (2025-06-16): Antonio:
Bill Atkinson was a legend. The @computerhistory.bsky.social has many interviews with him up on YouTube. This one is my favourite.
Update (2025-06-19): Dave Winer:
We don’t talk about our accomplishments that much in tech, on a personal level, we have an idea that Steve Jobs made the Mac, but it was really created by developers, designers, graphic artists, writers and application developers. Like Bill Atkinson.
I spent many years building on his work, and many more years wishing I still was. He made a contribution, and that’s, imho, pretty much the best you can say for any person’s life.
