The man who programmed Apple’s crown jewels: On the death of Bill Atkinson

William Dana Atkinson has significantly shaped the early Apple years with his software. Atkinson became known, among other things, through his work on Quickdraw, the basis of the graphic user management of the Apple computers Lisa and Macintosh. Macpaint and Hypercard, a forerunner of the WWW hypertext system, are also part of his legacy. Atkinson died on June 5.

Atkinson was born on March 17, 1951 in Ottumwa in the US state of Iowa as the third of seven children. The extended family spent a lot of time in the wild. A subscription to the magazine Arizona Highways was formative for the young Bill. He cut out the most beautiful nature shots and wallpapered his room with it

Professor Jef Raskin

He studied computer science and neurobiology, with his professor being one of Apple Computer’s first employees in “Computer Science” Jef Raskin. It was Raskin who crowded Bill Atkinson to work and with one Flight ticket for the performance at Steve Jobs supplied.

As 51st employees of the young company, Atkinson initially programmed a Pascal version for Apple II and then came to the team that was to develop the Lisa office computer while Raskin developed a home calculator with the code name Annie. The Macintosh emerged from this project.

In December 1979, Jobs from Xerox Investment offered a stock package worth one million US dollars and in return wanted to look “under the Kimono” what Xerox developed in his Palo Alto Research Center. The Apple team initially received only a short, superficial demo for which Larry Tesler was responsible. Iched hooks jobs hach ​​until Tesler was also allowed to show at a second meeting how the pixels on the screen were controlled by bitmapping.

This demo was the detonator for Atkinsons Quickdraw and the design of the graphic surfaces for Lisa and the Macintosh. In his job biography, Walter Isaacson writes about one of the “biggest industrial awareness of all time”, which is not entirely true. The windows of the Xerox surface were angular and they opened side by side or one after the other. But Atkinson was convinced that they overlapped themselves on a desk, and jobs absolutely wanted to be rounded windows. That was realized in Quickdraw.

Incidentally, Atkinson invented the double click with the mouse and the pull-down menus-at Xerox, key combinations had to be pressed in addition to the mouse. In his book on the development of Macinstosh, Steven Levy wrote about Atkinson: “Actually, he should only invent the wheel again, but in reality he was completely reinventing it.” Quickdraw was “the crown jewel in the entire Apple arsenal”, Macintosh developer Andy Hertzfeld recalls.

Atkinson finally switched to the Macintosh group because he was dissatisfied with the office orientation in the LISA project. Here he programmed the MacPaint paint software, for which he introduced himself in a commercial as a “artist and inventor”. That was right, because with his pallets and brushes, Macpaint was an early digital art tool that was imitated by many successors.

General Magic

In 1990 Bill Atkinson left Apple and founded General Magic, which was to develop small information systems for everyday life, with his friend Andy Hertzfeld and the investor Marc Porat. The applications of the Magic Communicating Applications Platform (Magic Cap) should communicate with each other via a DFÜ platform called Telescript. General Magic should therefore deliver the operating and networking system such as applications, but took a long time for all components available. As Motorola with the Envoy The train was departed on the basis of Magic Cap and the IBM data network in 1995.

After the end of General Magic devoted himself Bill Atkinson of his second great passion: Nature photography, which he had operated for 35 years as a hobby, became his new profession, which he took with great effort. With “Within the Stone”, his first book with macro shots of sanded stone surfaces appeared in 2004.

Atkinson had his last public appearance in 2024 when the 40th birthday of the Macintosh was celebrated. In October 2024, he announced that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He sailed through the Caribbean until shortly before his death. Atkinson died in the circle of his family.