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

My first meeting With Bill Atkinson was unforgettable. It was in November 1983, and Report for Rolling StoneI had access to the team to build the Macintosh computer, scheduled for early next year. Everyone said to me: “Wait until you meet Bill and Andy”, referring to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two key writers of Mac software. Here is what I wrote about the meeting in my book, Incredibly great:

I met Bill Atkinson first. A big guy with unruly hair, a mustache of Pancho Villa and flamboyant blue eyes, he had the disturbing intensity of Bruce Dern to one of his towers as a veterinarian Vietnam disarticulated. Like everyone in the room, he wore jeans and a t-shirt. “Do you want to see a bug?” He asked me. He pulled me in his cabin and pointed out towards 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 laboratory, but not on a personal computer. Atkinson laughed at his joke, then became very serious, speaking in an intense quasi-pearl that gave his words a reverent. “The barrier between words and images is broken,” he said. “So far, the art world has been a sacred club. Like fine China. Now, it’s for daily use.”

Atkinson was right. His contributions to Macintosh were essential to this breakthrough that he had whispered to me at the Apple office known as Bandley 3 that day. A few years later, he would alone make another giant contribution with a program called Hypercard, which prescribed the World Wide Web. Through all this, he has kept his energy and joie de vivre, and has become an inspiration for all those who would change the world through the code. On June 5, 2025, he died after a long illness. He was 74 years old.

Atkinson did not plan to become a pioneer in personal computer science. 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 him a year later. He was employed number 51. In 1979, he was part of the small group that Steve Jobs led to the Xerox Park research laboate and was blown away by the graphic computer interface he saw there. He has become his work to translate this futuristic technology towards the consumer, working on the Lisa de Apple project. In the process, he invented many conventions that still persist on today’s computers, such as menu bars. Atkinson has also created Quickdraw, a revolutionary technology to effectively draw objects on a screen. One of these objects was the “record” – a box with rounded corners that would be part of everyone’s computer experience. Atkinson had resisted the idea Until the jobs make him walk in the block and see all the traffic signs and other objects with rounded corners.

When Jobs resumed the other Apple project inspired by Parc technology, Macintosh, he poached Atkinson, whose work had already influenced this product. Hertzfeld, who was in charge of the Mac interface, explained to me once the characteristics of Lisa he had appropriated for the Mac: “All that Bill Atkinson did, I took, and nothing else.” He said. Atkinson, who had become disenchanted at Lisa’s high price, adopted the idea of ​​a more affordable version and began to write Macpaint, the program that will allow users to create art on the Mac mapping screen.

After the launch of the Mac, the team began to crash. Atkinson had the title of Apple Fellow, which gave him the freedom to continue passionate projects. He started working on something he called Magic Slate – a device with a high resolution screen that weighed under a book and could be controlled by a stylus and scales on a touch screen. Basically, he conceived the iPad 25 years earlier. But the technology was not ready to create something as miniaturized and powerful at an affordable price (Atkinson hoped that it would be so inexpensive that you could allow yourself to lose six in a year and not be disturbed.) “I wanted Magic Slate that I could taste it,” he told me once.