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
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HyperCard is what got me into programming as a child, and was one of my biggest creative outlets. Atkinson will always be a very influential person in my life for that reason, on top of everything else he did for early Macintosh.
