My first meeting Bill was unforgettable with Atkinson. It was November 1983, and reporting for Rolling Stone, I had access to the team of manufacturing Macintosh Computer, which launched earlier next year. Everyone kept telling me, “Wait until you meet Bill and Andy,” two prominent writers of Mac’s software, Etkinson and Andy Heartzfeld. Here I have written about the encounter in my book, Insanity:
I first met Bill Atkinson. A longer partner with uncontrolled hair, a punch -villa mustache, and burn to the blue eyes, they had an uncontrolled intensity of the bruce darn, which was in one of his turns as an untoward 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 cubical and pointed to his Macintosh. Filling the screen was an incredibly wide drawing of an insect. It was beautiful, some you can see at an expensive work center in a research laboratory, but not on an individual computer. Atkinson, laughing at his joke, then became very serious, talking in an intense near-shock, who gave his words the weight of a reverence. “The barrier between words and pictures is broken,” he said. “The world of art has been a sacred club so far. Like China. Now it is for daily use.”
Atkinson was right. His contribution to Macintosh was important for the success he whispered me in the Apple office known as Bandley 3 that day. A few years later, he would make another huge contribution with a program called Hypercard, which presided over the World Wide Web. Through all this, he retained his energy and Joi Day Viver, and became an inspiration for all that would change the world through code. On June 5, 2025, he died after a prolonged illness. He was 74 years old.
Atkinson did not plan to pioneers in personal computing. As a graduate student, he studied Computer Science and Neurobiology at the University of Washington. But when he faced an Apple II in 1977, he fell in love, and went to work for the company that made it a year later. The employee was number 51. In 1979, he was one of the small groups that Steve Jobs led the Zerox Park Research Lab and was blown by the graphic computer interface. While working on Apple’s LISA project, it became his job to translate that future technology to the consumer. In this process, he invented several conferences that still remain on today’s computers like the menu bar. Etkinson also created quickdrav, which was made a groundbreaking technique to attract objects efficiently on a screen. One of those items was “round -rect” -a box in which everyone would become part of computing experience with round corners. Atkinson opposed the idea until the jobs drove her around the block and saw all the traffic signals and other items with round corners.
When Jobs handled the other Apple project inspired by Parc Technology, Macintosh, he hunted Atkinson, whose work had already affected the product. Hertzfeld, who was in charge of Mac Interface, once explained to me that he applied Lisa facilities for Mac: “Bill Atkinson did anything, I took, and nothing.” He said. Atkinson, who was displaced in the high value tag of Lisa, adopted the idea of a more affordable version, and began to write McPant, the program that would empower users to create art on Mac’s bit-mapped screen.
After Mac launched, the team began to open. Atkinson had a title by Apple Fellow, which gave him the freedom to pursue passion projects. They called the magic slate-a tool with a high-resolution screen that can be weighed under one pound and can be controlled by a stylus and swipe on a touch screen. Originally, he was designing the iPad 25 years ago. But the technology was not ready to make something so small and powerful at an affordable price (Etkinson hoped that it would be so cheap that you could tolerate six to lose six in a year and would not bother.) “I wanted the magic slate to taste it,” he told me once.
