RIP: Bill Atkinson, Co-Creator Of Apple Lisa And Mac

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William Dana Atkinson was one of the core people on the teams that created the Lisa and then Macintosh computers at Apple in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was one of the most important and influential computer programmers who has ever lived. It is no exaggeration to say that all computer UIsdesigned in the last 40 years were shaped and influenced by Atkinson's brilliance and originality.

He dropped out of a doctorate in neuroscience to join Apple in 1978. He became employee # 51. In 2018, he said:

Some say Steve used me, but I say he harnessed and motivated me, and drew out my best creative energy. It was exciting working at Apple, knowing that whatever we invented would be used by millions of people.

Since the weekend when the news first broke, a remarkable range of tributes to the man and his work have appeared. For the Reg FOSS desk, one of the things that has particularly struck us is the range of different aspects of Atkinson's creativity that resonated with different people.

For instance, those working mainly online, such as TechCrunch's Antony Ha, call out HyperCard. Atkinson designed and wrote HyperCard, which introduced the wider world to the concept of hyperlinks as invented by Ted Nelson for his Xanadu hypertext system. Hypercard made it easy to create "stacks" of documents and navigate through them by clicking on links. As The Register has described more than once, it's inspired JavaScript recreations and parts of the Windows 10 UI, but most significantly of all it inspired the creators of the World Wide Web. It is specifically mentioned in the original proposal. Atkinson himself described the inspiration for Hypercard as a 1985 LSD trip.

Anyone who creates or edits pictures on computers uses tools that follow in the footsteps of an earlier Bill Atkinson app: he wrote MacPaint. Between it and his earlier version, LisaSketch, this introduced ideas like tool palettes, which became toolbars; the lasso tool to select objects; zoomed-in pixel editing, which Atkinson called FatBits; and the paint-bucket fill tool, among many other things.

Programmers who know his work nod with respect to lower-level stuff. The story of Apple's visit to Xerox, where the Xerox Alto graphical workstation inspired the Apple Lisa's overlapping windows, is well known. What's less well understood is that Smalltalk could only write or draw into one window, the topmost. It was impossible to update the contents of background windows. Atkinson was on that visit, but he didn't know that. He just assumed the Smalltalk team must have solved that, and all he had to do was work out how. He called his resulting algorithm regions and after a serious 1982 car accident and head injuries, Atkinson's first words to his visiting boss were "Don't worry, Steve, I still remember how to do regions."

Lower-level still, he is remembered for his remarkably efficient dithering algorithm, which you can try here.

As "Apple acolyte" Steven Levy wrote in Rolling Stone, Atkinson also brought Burrell Smith, designer of the original Macintosh hardware, to the project. In his book Insanely Great, Levy described the coming up with regions:

Atkinson worked at the problem for months - not only in long hours at a desk, but literally in his dreams. Upon arising he would record his somnambulant labors in a notebook. Eventually wave after wave of Atkinson's brainpower eroded the problem. He had set our to reinvent the wheel; actually he wound up inventing it.

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