[HN Gopher] Bill Atkinson has died
___________________________________________________________________
Bill Atkinson has died
https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10238073579963378&...
Author : romanhn
Score : 807 points
Date : 2025-06-07 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (daringfireball.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (daringfireball.net)
| agumonkey wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_dithering and so many
| other things
|
| rip
| msie wrote:
| RIP programming god.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Some notable stories from Folklore.org:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html
|
| https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html ---
| something to bring up whenever lines of code as a metric is put
| forward
|
| https://www.folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html --- story of how
| the Macintosh Finder came to be
|
| https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html ---
| surviving a car accident
| LorenDB wrote:
| The lines of code story is a timeless classic.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| > He thought and wrote "-2000 lines". Management stopped
| asking Bill to fill out the form.
|
| This lesson stuck with me for years. Final results alone are
| measurable, not productivity.
| garciasn wrote:
| Score code on line count and runtime golf. Shorter, faster,
| and fastest time to completion is best.
|
| Code that's 4K and took slightly less time to write but runs
| slightly faster than code that's 400 bytes that took another
| 30m to write still doesn't get the best score.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I kind think metrics are not the answer and instead one
| needs taste. Obviously performance is multidimensional both
| in what one measures (latency vs throughput) and as a
| function of the input. The solution you imagine that is
| slightly faster in the test could avoid (or introduce)
| different worst-case or asymptotic behaviour, for example.
| garciasn wrote:
| I argue we shouldn't be doing this at all; but, if we
| have to do to whatever insanely arbitrary metric a
| project/product/eng leader wants, this is probably a
| better metric than code length.
| leoc wrote:
| "Busy Being Born" https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
| , with its priceless early glimpses of the Lisa/Mac UI
| preserved in Polaroid photos, might be the best.
| bombcar wrote:
| This shows amazing foresight on Bill's part. It would have
| been easy for all that to be lost.
| fotta wrote:
| Wow. Rest in peace Bill. I think he is deserving of a black
| stripe up top.
| djmips wrote:
| 100%
| zahlman wrote:
| You can set your 'topcolor' in preferences, but this will
| obscure the links in the sidebar (barring local CSS hacking).
| froggertoaster wrote:
| I think you missed the point.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Atkinson is a legendary UX pioneer. Great technical skill and a
| deep understanding of the principles of interaction. His work,
| from the double click to HyperCard, continues to inspire my own
| work. You will be missed.
| pcunite wrote:
| "Some say Steve used me, but I say he harnessed and motivated me,
| and drew out my best creative energy." - Bill Atkinson
| asveikau wrote:
| Some of his old demos of graphics capabilities on the Mac or
| hypercard are around on YouTube, and I watched some maybe 10
| years ago. He displayed not just the tech chops but he was a good
| communicator. RIP.
| jmwilson wrote:
| HyperCard was my introduction to programming and delivered on the
| vision of personal computing as "bicycle for the mind." RIP
| matthewn wrote:
| In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and
| die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and
| inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this
| timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as
| one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that
| make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing
| devices actually become (for everyone, not just programmers) the
| "bicycle for the mind" that Steve Jobs spoke of. I think this is
| the timeline that Atkinson envisioned, and I wish I lived in it.
| We've lost a true visionary. Memory eternal!
| asveikau wrote:
| Maybe there's some sense of longing for a tool that's similar
| today, but there's no way of knowing how much hypercard _did_
| have the impact you are talking about. For example many of us
| reading here experienced HyperCard. It planted seeds in our
| future endeavors.
|
| I remember in elementary school, I had some computer lab
| classes where the whole class worked in hypercard on some task.
| Multiply that by however many classrooms did something like
| that in the 80s and 90s. That's a lot of brains that can be
| influenced and have been.
|
| We can judge it as a success in its own right, even if it never
| entered the next paradigm or never had quite an equivalent
| later on.
| cortesoft wrote:
| HyperCard was the foundation of my programming career. I
| treated the HyperCard Bible like an actual Bible.
| jkestner wrote:
| Word. This is the Papert philosophy of constructionism,
| learning to think by making that so many of us still carry.
| I'm still trying to build software-building software. We do
| live in that timeline; it's just unevenly distributed.
| lambdaone wrote:
| HyperCard was undoubtedly the inspiration for Visual Basic,
| which for quite some time dominated the bespoke UI industry
| in the same way web frameworks do today.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| HyperCard was great, but it wasn't the inspiration for
| Visual Basic.
|
| I was on the team that built Ruby (no relation to the
| programming language), which became the "Visual" side of
| Visual Basic.
|
| Alan Cooper did the initial design of the product, via a
| prototype he called Tripod.
|
| Alan had an unusual design philosophy at the time. He
| preferred to _not_ look at any existing products that may
| have similar goals, so he could "design in a vacuum" from
| first principles.
|
| I will ask him about it, but I'm almost certain that he
| never looked at HyperCard.
| jchrisa wrote:
| I haven't posted it here yet b/c it's not show ready, but we
| have been building this vision -- I like to think of it as an
| e-bike for the mind.
|
| https://vibes.diy/
|
| We had a lot of fun last night with Vibecode Karaoke, where you
| code an app at the same time as you sing a song.
| Arathorn wrote:
| It's ironic that the next graphical programming environment
| similar to Hypercard was probably Flash - and it obviously died
| too.
|
| What actually are the best successors now, at least for
| authoring generic apps for the open web? (Other than vibe
| coding things)
| jx47 wrote:
| I think that would be Decker (https://internet-
| janitor.itch.io/decker). Not my project but I found it some
| time ago when I searched for Hypercard successors. The neat
| thing is that it works in the browser.
| WillAdams wrote:
| This gets mentioned pretty much every time HyperCard is ---
| but I can't see that anyone has done anything with it.
|
| Why use it rather than Livecode (aside from the licensing
| of the latter) or Hypernext Studio?
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Some programs, games, and zines made with Decker:
| https://itch.io/games/tag-decker
|
| Unlike LiveCode (or so far as I am aware HyperNext),
| Decker is free and open-source:
| https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker
|
| HyperNext doesn't appear to be actively developed; the
| most recent updates I see are from last year, and it
| can't be used on modern computers. Decker's most recent
| release was yesterday morning.
|
| I'd be happy to go into more detail if you like.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Livecode used to be opensource, which made me want to use
| it, but that window closed.
|
| I guess I want a Flash replacement....
| jhbadger wrote:
| There's a fair amount of usage of it on Itch.io, if you
| are into that indie crowd. I was skeptical of it at first
| -- the whole 1-bit dithering aesthetic seems a bit too
| retro-twee, but I find it it is the best Hypercard-alike
| in terms of functionality -- it "just works" as compared
| to most Hyperclones that seem more like a proof of
| concept than a functional program.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Flash completely missed the most important point of
| HyperCard, which was that end users could put it into edit
| mode, explore the source code, learn from it, extend it, copy
| parts of it out, and build their own user interfaces with it.
|
| It's not just "View Source", but "Edit Source" with a built-
| in, easy to use, scriptable, graphical, interactive WYSIWYG
| editor that anyone can use.
|
| HyperCard did all that and more long before the web existed,
| was fully scriptable years before JavaScript existed, was
| extensible with plug-in XCMDs long before COM/OLE/ActiveX or
| even OpenDoc/CyberDog or Java/HotJava/Applets, and was widely
| available and embraced by millions of end-users, was used for
| games, storytelling, art, business, personal productivity,
| app development, education, publishing, porn, and so much
| more, way before merely static web page WYSIWYG editors (let
| alone live interactive scriptable extensible web application
| editors) ever existed.
|
| LiveCard (HyperCard as a live HTTP web app server back-end
| via WebStar/MacHTTP) was probably the first tool that made it
| possible to create live web pages with graphics and forms
| with an interactive WYSIWYG editor that even kids could use
| to publish live HyperCard apps, databases, and clickable
| graphics on the web.
|
| HyperCard deeply inspired HyperLook for NeWS, which was
| scripted, drawn, and modeled with PostScript, that I used to
| port SimCity to Unix:
|
| Alan Kay on "Should web browsers have stuck to being document
| viewers?" and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and
| HyperLook
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-
| browser...
|
| >"Apple's Hypercard was a terrific and highly successful end-
| user authoring system whose media was scripted, WYSIWYG, and
| "symmetric" (in the sense that the "reader" could turn around
| and "author" in the same high-level terms and forms). It
| should be the start of -- and the guide for -- the "User
| Experience" of encountering and dealing with web content.
|
| >"The underlying system for a browser should not be that of
| an "app" but of an Operating System whose job would be to
| protectively and safely run encapsulated systems (i.e. "real
| objects") gotten from the web. It should be the way that web
| content could be open-ended, and not tied to functional
| subsets in the browser." -Alan Kay
|
| >[...] This work is so good -- for any time -- and especially
| for its time -- that I don't want to sully it with any
| criticisms in the same reply that contains this praise.
|
| >I will confess to not knowing about most of this work until
| your comments here -- and this lack of knowledge was a minus
| in a number of ways wrt some of the work that we did at
| Viewpoints since ca 2000.
|
| >(Separate reply) My only real regret about this terrific
| work is that your group missed the significance for personal
| computing of the design of Hypertalk in Hypercard.
|
| >It's not even that Hypertalk is the very best possible way
| to solve the problems and goals it took on -- hard to say one
| way or another -- but I think it is the best example ever
| actually done and given to millions of end users. And by
| quite a distance.
|
| >Dan Winkler and Bill Atkinson violated a lot of important
| principles of "good programming language design", but they
| achieved the first overall system in which end-users "could
| see their own faces", and could do many projects, and learn
| as they went.
|
| >For many reasons, a second pass at the end-user programming
| problem -- that takes advantage of what was learned from
| Hypercard and Hypertalk -- has never been done (AFAIK). The
| Etoys system in Squeak Smalltalk in the early 2000s was very
| successful, but the design was purposely limited to 8-11 year
| olds (in part because of constraints from working at Disney).
|
| >It's interesting to contemplate that the follow on system
| might not have a close resemblance to Hypertalk -- perhaps
| only a vague one ....
|
| SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee
| HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-
| go...
|
| >HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript
| graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique
| and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS
| was all about, and where we could go in the future!
|
| >The Axis of Eval: Code, Graphics, and Data
|
| >Hi Alan! Outside of Sun, at the Turing Institute in Glasgow,
| Arthur van Hoff developed a NeWS based reimagination of
| HyperCard in PostScript, first called GoodNeWS, then
| HyperNeWS, and finally HyperLook. It used PostScript for
| code, graphics, and data (the axis of eval). [...]
|
| >What's the Big Deal About HyperCard?
|
| >"I thought HyperCard was quite brilliant in the end-user
| problems it solved. (It would have been wonderfully better
| with a deep dynamic language underneath, but I think part of
| the success of the design is that they didn't have all the
| degrees of freedom to worry about, and were just able to
| concentrate on their end-user's direct needs.
|
| >"HyperCard is an especially good example of a system that
| was "finished and smoothed and documented" beautifully. It
| deserved to be successful. And Apple blew it by not making
| the design framework the basis of a web browser (as old PARC
| hands advised in the early 90s ...)" -Alan Kay
|
| HyperLook SimCity Demo Transcript
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-simcity-demo-
| transcr...
|
| >[...] All this is written in PostScript, all the graphics.
| The SimCity engine is in C, but all the user interface and
| the graphics are in PostScript.
|
| >The neat thing about doing something like this in HyperLook
| is that HyperLook is kind of like HyperCard, in that all of
| the user interface is editable. So these windows we're
| looking at here are like stacks, that we can edit.
|
| >Now I'll flip this into edit mode, while the program's
| running. That's a unique thing.
|
| >Now I'm in edit mode, and this reset button here is just a
| user interface component that I can move around, and I can
| hit the "Props" key, and get a property sheet on it.
|
| >I'll show you what it really is. See, every one of these
| HyperLook objects has a property sheet, and you can define
| its graphics. I'll zoom in here. We have this nice PostScript
| graphics editor, and we could turn it upside down, or
| sideways, or, you know, like that. Or scale it. I'll just
| undo, that's pretty useful.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134403
|
| DonHopkins on Dec 26, 2022 | parent | context | favorite |
| on: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
|
| Speaking about HyperCard, creating web pages, and publishing
| live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web, I wrote this
| about LiveCard:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283045
|
| DonHopkins on Feb 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
|
| Check out this mind-blowing thing called "LiveCard" that
| somebody made by combining HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar (a
| Mac web server by Chuck Shotton that supported integration
| with other apps via Apple Events)! It was like implementing
| interactive graphical CGI scripts with HyperCard, without
| even programming (but also allowing you to script them in
| HyperTalk, and publish live HyperCard databases and
| graphics)! Normal HyperCard stacks would even work without
| modification. It was far ahead of its time, and inspired me
| to integrate WebStar with ScriptX to generate static and
| dynamic HTML web sites and services!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209
|
| MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton, and
| LiveCard HyperCard stack publisher:
|
| CGI and AppleScript:
|
| http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-
| applescript/1...
|
| >Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then
| describes how you can use the AppleScript language for
| writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263
|
| MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton! He was also
| VP of Engineering at Quarterdeck, another pioneering company.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astron.
| ..
|
| http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machtt.
| ..
|
| http://tidbits.com/article/6292
|
| >It had an AppleScript / OSA API that let you write handlers
| for responding to web hits in other languages that supported
| AppleScript.
|
| I used it to integrate ScriptX with the web:
|
| http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-
| www.htm...
|
| https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-
| develop...
|
| The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate
| it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live
| INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see
| as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by
| html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio
| buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in
| the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to
| interactive with live HyperCard pages!
|
| That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and
| even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but
| publish live interactive apps on the web!
|
| Using HyperCard as a CGI application
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060205023024/http://aaa-
| protei...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20021013161709/http://pfhyper.co.
| ..
|
| http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-
| applescript/1...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19990208235151/http://www.royals.
| ..
|
| What was it actually ever used for? Saving kid's lives, for
| one thing:
|
| >Livecard has exceeded all expectations and allows me to
| serve a stack 8 years in the making and previously confined
| to individual hospitals running Apples. A whole Childrens
| Hospital and University Department of Child Health should now
| swing in behind me and this product will become core
| curriculum for our medical course. Your product will save
| lives starting early 1997. Well done.
|
| - Director, Emergency Medicine, Mater Childrens Hospital
| kadushka wrote:
| _inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In
| this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as
| easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal
| apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove_
|
| LLMs inspired vibe coding - that's our timeline.
| mannyv wrote:
| Hypercard must have been a support nightmare.
| zahlman wrote:
| Mr. Atkinson's passing was sad enough without thinking about
| this.
|
| (More seriously: I can still recall using ResEdit to hack a
| custom FONT resource into a HyperCard stack, then using string
| manipulation in a text field to create tiled graphics. This
| performed much better than button icons or any other approach I
| could find. And then it stopped working in System 7.)
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Not sure that sculpting clay is the best analogy. Lots of
| sculpting is hard, as is turning clay, especially if you want
| to successfully fire the result. Maybe it is an accurate
| analogy, but people may understand the difficulty differently.
| bombcar wrote:
| Hypercard is more like Lego - you can simply buy completed
| sets (use other's hypercard programs) - or you can put
| together things according to instructions - but you can
| always take them apart and change them, and eventually build
| your own.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-
| Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with
| a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that
| sense it _does_ live on, and serves as the basis for much of
| the modern Internet.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285675
|
| DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
|
| Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released:
| the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge
| Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham? SmutStack was the first
| commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two
| weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost
| $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2,
| the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual
| adventure you could imagine in it, including information about
| gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was
| also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on
| Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-...
|
| >Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at
| the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection
| (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that
| would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when
| the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of
| Chuck's Weird World fame.
|
| >How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down
| at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went
| up around Apple.
|
| >It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea
| market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs
| for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home,
| he got them running and discovered several early builds of
| HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling
| around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack,
| which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the
| only commercial stacks available at the show.
|
| https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl...
|
| Page 69 of https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990
|
| >Famham's Choice
|
| >This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom
| readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed
| gadfly known for rooting around in Apple's trash cans. One of
| Farnham 's myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose
| products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge
| Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last
| comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and,
| for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented
| Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this
| up.
|
| >Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut
| trade. "The problem with porno is generic," he says, sounding
| for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. "When you
| do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say
| it's yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and
| country and say, 'It's mine.' I don't mind being called Mr.
| Scum Bag."
|
| >On the other hand, he admits cheerily, "There's a huge market
| for sex stuff." This despite the lack of true eroticism. "It's
| a novelty," says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of
| those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a
| disappearing bikini.
|
| https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer...
|
| Page 18 of https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110
|
| >"Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack,
| which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a
| MacWorld Expo. He's embarrassed how much money a silly
| collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women
| brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator,
| was also a hit.
|
| I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of
| the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know
| of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of
| art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it
| is hilarious.
|
| Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck
| online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From
| Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut
| Stack:
|
| https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts
|
| I love the way Chuck holds his smirk throughout the entire
| interview. And Geraldo's reply to his comment: "I was a
| fulfillment house for orders."
|
| "That sounds sexual in itself! What was a fulfilment house?"
| al_borland wrote:
| I actually had an experience like this yesterday. After reading
| Gruber talk about how Markdown was never meant for notes, I
| started to rethink things. I wanted plain text, to be future
| proof, then stumbled across CotEditor as a means to edit.
| Inside I was able to use the code highlighting and outline
| config to define my own regex and effectively create my own
| markup language with just a dash of regex and nothing more. I
| then jumped over to Shortcuts and dragged and dropped some
| stuff together to open/create yearly and daily notes (on either
| my computer or phone), or append to a log with a quick action.
|
| It is a custom system that didn't require any code (if you
| don't count the very minor bits of regex (just a lot of stuff
| like... ^\s _- ._ ).
|
| Is it a good system, probably not, but we'll see where it goes.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Oh. I came here to pass the time as I built a TinyMac with a Pi
| and was compiling BasiliskII in SDL mode. I'm quite saddened by
| the news, as Bill was one of the people who had the most
| influence in the technical design of early Macs (and a brilliant
| engineer for all accounts).
|
| Why isn't the black bar up atop the site?
| dlachausse wrote:
| He's definitely deserving of the black bar.
|
| This post is only an hour old as I'm writing this, so give it
| time. It's a weekend, and as far as I'm aware there are only 2
| mods, unless there are others empowered to turn on the black
| bar in their absence.
| dakiol wrote:
| RIP. It still suprises me that people with resources die so early
| (he died at 74).
| deadbabe wrote:
| Resources only help you reach your genetic potential, but if
| you're just not built for longevity you still may not live
| long.
|
| And some people with no resources, no reason to live, but have
| incredible genetics will linger for many years beyond what
| people think is possible, like a weed.
| jamessinghal wrote:
| People without resources or purpose are a weed?
| accrual wrote:
| _Like_ a weed, in the sense of living in spite of ones
| circumstances. For example, a person with limited resources
| living for a long time, which is like a weed with little
| sunlight still growing from a crack in concrete.
| andoando wrote:
| I wouldnt consider 74 early.
| saalweachter wrote:
| It's not "he was so young", but it's still a few years shy of
| "he had a good, long life" IMO.
| melling wrote:
| It is early.
|
| "A 60-year-old male in the US can expect to live until about
| age 82"
|
| Pancreatic cancer usually is hard to detect until it's
| reached an advanced stage. We really should invest more into
| research
| mitchbob wrote:
| Bill pushed himself to his limits. I saw this first hand at
| General Magic, and heard the stories about the development of
| the Macintosh. People can wear themselves out.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > RIP. It still suprises me that people with resources die so
| early (he died at 74).
|
| You don't know for how long he did have that disease, if
| anything, resources might have afforded him many more years of
| life at first place.So your comment strikes me as odd, given
| the fact that you can't judge how long did he live with such
| disease.
|
| One of my friend's dad died from the same kind of cancer.
| Between the diagnosis and their death, 2 months passed, and
| that person had plenty of "resources"...
| busymom0 wrote:
| A friend of mine's diagnosis to death was less than a week.
| It all happened so fast, they couldn't process what had just
| happened.
|
| It happened during a family reunion for Christmas, so at
| least everyone was present.
| mindslight wrote:
| Life is not guaranteed. Once you've seen it happen a few times,
| you realize how stochastic death really is (or really, how
| stochastic _living_ is). 74 is at least not the territory where
| people generally gasp at how young he was.
| djmips wrote:
| Gompertz mortality curve. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gom
| pertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law...
| melling wrote:
| Pancreatic cancer. Still quite deadly. It has been 17 years
| since Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture.
|
| https://youtu.be/ji5_MqicxSo?si=TlgWzgQ7bD3Usvu3
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Steve also, correct? Wonder if it has anything to do with the
| chemical dumping in silicon valley.
| movingontonext wrote:
| Jeff Raskin too. Three key people at various points in the
| original Macintosh's development.
| melling wrote:
| There were a lot of Superfund sites in Silicon Valley.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/lens/the-superfund-
| sites-...
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Unless you're getting preventative screenings frequently,
| pancreatic cancer can be one of those ones that don't show any
| symptoms til you're already in stage 4. And most normal doctors
| will tell you to not do large amounts of preventative
| screenings.
| monster_truck wrote:
| There isn't an amount of resources in the world that will
| protect you from cancer, despite what some claim. Like my
| grandma said, "it is your reward for surviving absolutely
| everything else that could have got you" (she beat 3 different
| kinds of cancer before losing to a 4th, with 'resources')
| dkislyuk wrote:
| From Walter Isaacson's _Steve Jobs_:
|
| > One of Bill Atkinson's amazing feats (which we are so
| accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow
| the windows on a screen to overlap so that the "top" one clipped
| into the ones "below" it. Atkinson made it possible to move these
| windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those
| below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of
| course, on a computer screen there are no layers of pixels
| underneath the pixels that you see, so there are no windows
| actually lurking underneath the ones that appear to be on top. To
| create the illusion of overlapping windows requires complex
| coding that involves what are called "regions." Atkinson pushed
| himself to make this trick work because he thought he had seen
| this capability during his visit to Xerox PARC. In fact the folks
| at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they
| were amazed that he had done so. "I got a feeling for the
| empowering aspect of naivete", Atkinson said. "Because I didn't
| know it couldn't be done, I was enabled to do it." He was working
| so hard that one morning, in a daze, he drove his Corvette into a
| parked truck and nearly killed himself. Jobs immediately drove to
| the hospital to see him. "We were pretty worried about you", he
| said when Atkinson regained consciousness. Atkinson gave him a
| pained smile and replied, "Don't worry, I still remember
| regions."
| rjsw wrote:
| I think the difference between the Apple and Xerox approach may
| be more complicated than the people at PARC not knowing how to
| do this. The Alto doesn't have a framebuffer, each window has
| its own buffer and the microcode walks the windows to work out
| what to put on each scanline.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Not doubting that, but what is the substantive difference
| here? Does the fact that there is a screen buffer on the Mac
| facilitate clipping that is otherwise not possible on the
| Alto?
| lambdaone wrote:
| It allows the Mac to use far less RAM to display
| overlapping windows, and doesn't require any extra
| hardware. Individual regions are refreshed independently of
| the rest of the screen, with occlusion, updates, and
| clipping managed automatically,
| saghm wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like the hard part of this problem isn't
| merely coming up with a solution that technically is
| correct, but one that also is efficient enough to be
| actually useful. Throwing specialized or more expensive
| hardware at something is a valid approach for problems
| like this, but all else being equal, having a lower
| hardware requirement is better.
| al_borland wrote:
| I was just watching an interview with Andy Hertzfeld
| earlier today and he said this was the main challenge of
| the Macintosh project. How to take a $10k system (Lisa)
| and run it on a $3k system (Macintosh).
|
| He said they drew a lot of inspiration from Woz on the
| hardware side. Woz was well known for employing lots of
| little hacks to make things more efficient, and the
| Macintosh team had to apply the same approach to
| software.
| aaronharder wrote:
| More details here:
| https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html
| rsync wrote:
| Displaying graphics (of any kind) without a framebuffer is
| called "racing the beam" and is technically quite difficult
| and involves managing the real world speed of the electron
| beam with the cpu clock speed ... as in, if you tax the cpu
| too much the beam goes by and you missed it ...
|
| The _very characteristic_ horizontally stretched graphics
| of the Atari 2600 are due to this - the CPU was actually
| too slow, in a sense, for the electron beam which means
| your horizontal graphic elements had a fairly large minimum
| width - you couldn 't change the output fast enough.
|
| I strongly recommend:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
|
| ... which goes into great detail on this topic and is one
| of my favorite books.
| ehaliewicz2 wrote:
| It definitely makes it simpler. You can do a per-screen
| window sort, rather than per-pixel :).
|
| Per-pixel sorting while racing the beam is tricky, game
| consoles usually did it by limiting the number of objects
| (sprites) per-line, and fetching+caching them before the
| line is reached.
| mjevans wrote:
| Reminds me of a GPU's general workflow. (like the sibling
| comment, 'isn't that the obvious way this is done'? Different
| drawing areas being hit by 'firmware' / 'software'
| renderers?)
| jajko wrote:
| Pretty awesome story, but also with a bit of dark lining. Of
| course any owner, and triple that for Jobs, loves over-
| competent guys who work themselves to the death, here almost
| literally.
|
| But that's not a recipe for personal happiness for most people,
| and most of us would not end up contributing revolutionary
| improvements even if done so. World needs awesome workers, and
| we also need ie awesome parents or just happy balanced content
| people (or at least some part of those).
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Pretty much. Most of us have creative itches to scratch that
| make us a bit miserable if we never get to pursue them, even
| if given a comfortable life. It's circumstantial whether we
| get to pursue them as entrepreneurs or employees. The users
| or enjoyers of our work benefit either way.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Just to add on, some of us have creative itches that are
| not directly monetizable, and for which there may be no
| users or enjoyers of our work at all (if there are, all the
| better!).
|
| Naturally I don't expect to do such things for a living.
| bowsamic wrote:
| What is the dark lining? Do you think Atkinson did not feel
| totally satisfied with his labour?
|
| And I don't think anyone said that that's the only way to be
| richardw wrote:
| Survivorship bias. The guys going home at 5 went home at 5
| and their companies are not written about. It's dark but
| we've been competing for a while as life forms and this is
| "dark-lite" compared to what our previous generations had to
| do.
|
| Some people are competing, and need to make things happen
| that can't be done when you check out at 5. Or more
| generally: the behaviour that achieves the best outcome for a
| given time and place, is what succeeds and forms the legends
| of those companies.
|
| If you choose one path, know your competitors are testing the
| other paths. You succeed or fail partly based on what your
| most extreme competitors are willing to do, sometimes with
| some filters for legality and morality. (I.e. not universally
| true for all countries or times.)
|
| Edit: I currently go home at 5, but have also been the person
| who actually won the has-no-life award. It's a continuum, and
| is context specific. Both are right and sometimes one is
| necessary.
| duskwuff wrote:
| That's not quite how I read the story. Jobs didn't ask
| Atkinson if he remembered regions - Atkinson brought it up.
| asveikau wrote:
| It's also a joke, and a pretty good one at that. Shows a
| sense of humor.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| With overlapping rectangular windows (slightly simpler case
| than ones with rounded corners) you can expect visible regions
| of windows that are not foremost to be, for example, perhaps
| "L" shaped, perhaps "T" shaped (if there are many windows and
| they overlap left and right edges). Bill's region structure
| was, as I understand it, more or less a RLE (run-length
| encoded) representation of the visible rows of a window's
| bounds. The region for the topmost window (not occluded in any
| way) would indicate the top row as running from 0 to width-of-
| window (or right edge of the display if clipped by the
| display). I believe too there was a shortcut to indicate "oh,
| and the following rows are identical" so that an un-occluded
| rectangular window would have a pretty compact region
| representation.
|
| Windows partly obscured would have rows that may not begin at
| 0, may not continue to width-of-window. Window regions could
| even have holes if a skinnier window was on top and within the
| width of the larger background window.
|
| The cleverness, I think, was then to write fast routines to
| add, subtract, intersect, and union regions, and rectangles of
| this structure. Never mind quickly traversing them, clipping to
| them, etc.
| duskwuff wrote:
| The QuickDraw source code refers to the contents of the
| Region structure as an "unpacked array of sorted inversion
| points". It's a little short on details, but you can sort of
| get a sense of how it works by looking at the implementation
| of PtInRgn(Point, RegionHandle):
|
| https://github.com/historicalsource/supermario/blob/9dd3c4be.
| ..
|
| As far as I can tell, it's a bounding box (in typical L/T/R/B
| format), followed by a sequence of the X/Y coordinates of
| every "corner" inside the region. It's fairly compact for
| most region shapes which arise from overlapping rectangular
| windows, and very fast to perform hit tests on.
| bluedino wrote:
| > In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they
| later told him they were amazed that he had done so.
|
| Reminds me of the story where some company was making a new VGA
| card, and it was rumored a rival company had implemented a
| buffer of some sort in their card. When both cards came out the
| rival had either not actually implemented it or implemented a
| far simpler solution
| alanfalcon wrote:
| An infamous Starcraft example also contains notes of a
| similar story where they were so humbled by a competitor's
| demo (and criticism that their own game was simply "Warcraft
| in space") that they went back and significantly overhauled
| their game.
|
| Former Ion Storm employees later revealed that Dominion's E3
| 1996 demo was pre-rendered, with actors pretending to play,
| not live gameplay.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Similar tale with propaganda and stats with asterisks
| missing about the MiG-25 leading to the requirements for
| the F-15 being very high.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Bill Atkinson, all smiles as he receives applause from the
| audience for his work on Mac Paint:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhISGtLhPx4
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That's a great video. Everything he does gets applause and he
| is all (embarrassed?) grins.
| pducks32 wrote:
| Would someone mind explaining the technical aspect here? I feel
| with modern compute and OS paradigms I can't appreciate this.
| But even now I know that feeling when you crack it and the
| thrill of getting the imposible to work.
|
| It's on all of us to keep the history of this field alive and
| honor the people who made it all possible. So if anyone would
| nerd out on this, I'd love to be able to remember him that way.
|
| (I did read this
| https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html but
| might be not understanding it fully)
| giovannibajo1 wrote:
| There were far fewer abstraction layers than today. Today
| when your desktop application draws something, it gets drawn
| into a context (a "buffer") which holds the picture of the
| whole window. Then the window manager / compositor simply
| paints all the windows on the screen, one on top of the
| other, in the correct priority (I'm simplifying a lot, but
| just to get the idea). So when you are programing your
| application, you don't care about other applications on the
| screen; you just draw the contents of your window and that's
| done.
|
| Back at the time, there wouldn't be enough memory to hold a
| copy of the full contents all possible windows. In fact,
| there were actually zero abstraction layers: each application
| was responsible to draw itself directly into the framebuffer
| (array of pixels), into its correct position. So how to
| handle overlapping windows? How could each application draw
| itself on the screen, but _only_ on the pixels not covered by
| other windows?
|
| QuickDraw (the graphics API written by Atkinson) contained
| this data structure called "region" which basically represent
| a "set of pixels", like a mask. And QuickDraw drawing
| primitives (eg: text) supported clipping to a region. So each
| application had a region instance representing all visible
| pixels of the window at any given time; the application would
| then clip all its drawing to the region, so that only the
| visibile pixels would get updated.
|
| But how was the region implemented? Obviously it could have
| not been a mask of pixels (as in, a bitmask) as it would use
| too much RAM and would be slow to update. In fact, think that
| the region datastructure had to be quick at doing also
| operations like intersections, unions, etc. as the operating
| system had to update the regions for each window as windows
| got dragged around by the mouse.
|
| So the region was implemented as a bounding box plus a list
| of visible horizontal spans (I think, I don't know exactly
| the details). When you represent a list of spans, a common
| hack is to use simply a list of coordinates that represent
| the coordinates at which the "state" switches between "inside
| the span" to "outside the span". This approach makes it for
| some nice tricks when doing operations like intersections.
|
| Hope this answers the question. I'm fuzzy on many details so
| there might be several mistakes in this comment (and I
| apologize in advance) but the overall answer should be good
| enough to highlight the differences compared to what
| computers to today.
| scrlk wrote:
| Bill Atkinson demoing MacPaint at the Macintosh introduction in
| 1984: https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?t=1781
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Plenty of interviews will Bill on YouTube. Example:
| https://youtu.be/dhlKTRU--VA
|
| Also, perhaps the General Magic documentary is a fun watch too:
| https://youtu.be/JQymn5flcek
| iainmerrick wrote:
| One of my favourite Atkinson stories -- I can't remember if this
| is on folklore.org or somewhere else -- is that he actually
| implemented editable text in MacPaint, by scanning the bitmap for
| character shapes, but chose not to ship that feature because it
| could never be perfect. Amazing technical skill _and_ great taste
| and judgement.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Here's the story - https://folklore.org/MacPaint_Evolution.html
| gavmor wrote:
| If you haven't, check out the documentary[0] on General Magic
| which Bill co-founded in 1990. Among the more remarkable scenes
| in there is when a member of the public seems perplexed by the
| thought that they would even _want_ to "check email from Times
| Square."
|
| An unthinkable future, but they thought it. And yet, most folks
| have never heard of General Magic.
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek
| dboreham wrote:
| Invaluable film if you believe Apple invented the smart phone.
| gavmor wrote:
| Invaluable film if you believe invention is what made Apple
| valuable.
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Atkinson
|
| Bill on Steve Jobs and HyperCard:
|
| https://youtu.be/kzKCZN3UsRQ?si=eNIsysWdrjp2tHwd
|
| Black bar, please.
| cm2187 wrote:
| worth watching the full show, was very interesting
| mindslight wrote:
| The contents of the link do not pertain to the title.
|
| > _You must log in to continue._
|
| > _Log Into Facebook_
|
| > _You must log in to continue._
|
| I suggest finding a URL with some actual information content.
| frou_dh wrote:
| Are you doing a Comic-Book-Guy impersonation?
| mindslight wrote:
| No, just someone who isn't steeped in surveillance culture.
| My obtuseness is just a direct response to the obtuseness of
| the surveillance industry demanding "consent" when I'm trying
| to read about someone's death. I have also entered throwaway
| nyms for the online streams of family funerals that have
| tried to bundle abusive legal terms. What's socially gauche
| here is letting a moment of mourning turn into leverage for
| the surveillance industry.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Wow ... made my first app on Hypercard in high school ... Loved
| it.
|
| RIP Mr Bill Atkinson
| edbaskerville wrote:
| I wish I could have met him before he died.
|
| I'm yet another child of HyperCard. It opened my mind to what
| computers could be for, and even though the last two decades have
| been full primarily of disappointment, I still hold onto that
| other path as a possibility, or even as a slice of reality---a
| few weeds growing in the cracks of our dystopian concrete.
| TruffleLabs wrote:
| I loved his PhotoCard app as it allowed for image customization
| of the stamp and ability to be printed on very high quality card
| stock and ink.
| dondakirme wrote:
| RIP
| baumgarn wrote:
| I fondly remember creating simple narrative stories and games
| with HyperCard at 6 years old on my dad's Macintosh SE. It was my
| first contact with programming and a fundamental seed to using
| the computer as a creative tool. It has shaped my life in a
| substantial way. RIP Bill - HN bar should be blacked out.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| When I was on the ColorSync team at Apple we, the engineers, got
| an invite to his place-in-the-woods one day.
|
| I knew who he was at the time, but for some reason I felt I was
| more or less beholden to conversing only about color-related
| issues and how they applied to a computer workflow. Having
| retired, I have been kicking myself for some time not just
| chatting with him about ... whatever.
|
| He was at the time I met him very in to a kind of digital
| photography. My recollection was that he had a high-end drum
| scanner and was in fact scanning film negatives (medium format
| camera?) and then going with a digital workflow from that point
| on. I remember he was excited about the way that "darks" could be
| captured (with the scanner?). A straight analog workflow would,
| according to him, cause the darks to roll off (guessing the film
| was not the culprit then, perhaps the analog printing process).
|
| He excitedly showed us on his computer photos he took along the
| Pacific ocean of large rock outcroppings against the ocean --
| pointing out the detail that you could see in the shadow of the
| rocks. He was putting together a coffee table book of his photos
| at the time.
|
| I have to say that I mused at the time about a wealthy, retired,
| engineer who throws money at high end photo gear and suddenly
| thinks they're a photographer. I think I was weighing his
| "technical" approach to photography vs. a strictly artistic one.
| Although, having learned more about Ansel Adams technical chops,
| perhaps for the best photographers there is overlap.
| gxs wrote:
| > I have to say that I mused at the time about a wealthy,
| retired, engineer who throws money at high end photo gear and
| suddenly thinks they're a photographer
|
| I think this says more about you than it does about him
| viccis wrote:
| It's true though. This effect is what keeps companies like
| PRS in business.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a whole industry of prosumer stuff in ... well,
| many industries.
|
| Power tools definitely have it!
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack. The cost outweighs
| any benefit.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| gxs wrote:
| Ugh I hate that you're almost always right
|
| I was about to argue but then I saw this part
|
| > The cost outweighs any benefit.
|
| And this is absolutely true - there is a benefit but it
| doesn't mean it's worth it
|
| Either way my bad, I should have elaborated and been more
| gentle instead of just that quip
| spiralcoaster wrote:
| This is absolutely true and I don't understand why you're
| being downvoted. Especially in the context of this man just
| recently dying, there's someone throwing in their elitist
| opinion about photographers and how photography SHOULD be
| done, and apparently Bill was doing it wrong.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Well, I certainly didn't mean for it to come across that
| way. I wasn't saying this _was_ the case with Bill. To be
| clear, I saw nothing bad about Bill 's photos. (Also I'm
| not really versed enough in professional photography to
| have a valid opinion even if I didn't like them and so
| would not have publicly weighed in on them anyway.)
|
| I was though being honest about how I felt at that time --
| debated whether to keep it to myself or not today (but I
| always foolishly error on the side of being forthcoming).
|
| Perhaps it's a strange thing to imagine that someone would
| pursue in their spare time, especially after retired, what
| they did professionally.
| brulard wrote:
| He said "at the time". If I say "I thought X at the time"
| it implies I have reconsidered since. Your parents comment
| was unnecessarily condescending
| gxs wrote:
| It's just the timing and how he said it, especially
| considering the tone of the message overall
|
| But the irony isn't lost on me that I myself shouldn't
| have been so mean about it
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't deny that. That's probably true about a lot of
| observations.
| throwanem wrote:
| There probably still isn't a good way to get that kind of
| dynamic range entirely in the digital domain. Oh, I'm sure the
| shortfall today is smaller, say maybe four or five stops versus
| probably eight or twelve back then. Nonetheless, I've done
| enough work in monochrome to recognize an occasional need to
| work around the same limitations he was, even though very few
| of my subjects are as demanding.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I wish a good monochrome digital camera didn't cost a small
| fortune. And I'm too scared to try to remove the Bayer grid
| from a "color" CCD.
|
| Seems that, without the color/Bayer thing, you could get an
| extra stop or two for low-light.
|
| I had a crazy notion to make a camera around an astronomical
| CCD (often monochrome) but they're not cheap either -- at
| least one with a good pixel count.
| throwanem wrote:
| I've replaced my D5300's viewfinder focusing screen a
| couple of times, back before I outgrew the need for
| focusing aids. I also wouldn't try debayering its sensor!
| But that sort of thing is what cheap beater bodies off your
| friendly local camera store's used counter, or eBay, were
| made for. Pixel count isn't everything, and how better to
| find out whether the depth of your interest would reward
| serious investment, than to see whether and how soon it
| outgrows _un_ serious? Indeed, my own entire interest in
| photography has developed just so, out of a simple
| annoyance at having begun to discover what a 2016 phone
| camera couldn't do.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| :) Color in the computer is a good "whatever" topic.
|
| Sometimes it's just nice to talk about the progress of
| humanity. Nothing better than being a part of it, the gears
| that make the world turn.
| gdubs wrote:
| Atkinson's work is so influential. From his contributions to the
| Macintosh team, to HyperCard, Bill was an inspiration to me and
| showed the power of merging art & technology.
|
| Thanks for everything, Bill -- Rest in Peace.
| wesnerm2 wrote:
| Atkinson's HyperCard was released in 1987, before the widespread
| adoption of the web. HyperCard introduced concepts like
| interactive stacks of cards, scripting, and linking, which were
| later adopted and expanded upon in the web. Robert Cailliau, who
| assisted Tim Berners-Lee in developing the first web browser, was
| influenced by HyperCard's hyperlink concept.
| davisr wrote:
| I first met Bill over video-chat during 2020 and we got to know
| each other a bit. He later sent me a gift that changed my life.
| We hadn't talked for the past couple years, but I know he
| experienced "death" before and was as psychologically prepared as
| anyone could be. I have no doubt that he handled the biggest trip
| of his life with grace. We didn't always see eye-to-eye when it
| came to software, but we did share a mutual interest in the
| unknown, and the meaning of it all. Meet ya on the other side,
| Bill.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Don't leave us hanging. What was the gift?
| cess11 wrote:
| Perhaps there were enough clues in the message to figure it
| out.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Perhaps a colorful postcard with the message:
|
| * <= Lick This Spot
|
| (You may be one of the Lucky 20!)
| happycube wrote:
| CHM posted MacPaint and QuickDraw source:
| https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour...
| kapitanjakc wrote:
| I've read stories about him on folklore.
|
| He was a good man and great engineer.
|
| RIP
| thought_alarm wrote:
| Bill Atkinson was a very fascinating guy. His interview with Leo
| Laporte from 2013 is a great listen.
|
| Here's a little 6 minute clip: An acid trip, and the origins of
| Hypercard.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdJKjBHCh18
| bilekas wrote:
| I need a facebook account to see this post ?
|
| Can we get a better link maybe on the homepage ?
| rmason wrote:
| Here's a post that quotes the original Facebook post and adds
| some personal comments.
|
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/bill-atkinson-r...
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! I've changed the link to that from https://m.facebook
| .com/story.php?story_fbid=1023807357996337... above (but put
| the original URL in the top text so people can read both).
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| For anyone (like me) wondering who this guy was, he was a
| prominent UI guy at Apple back in the day. According to Wikipedia
| he created the menu bar, QuickDraw, and HyperCard.
|
| For whomever submits stories like this, _please_ say who the
| person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech
| knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I 've
| heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.
| djmips wrote:
| He was more then a prominent UI guy - back then he was designer
| and programmer - designing and coding the foundations.
| gdubs wrote:
| Adding a bit more context: The World Wide Web arguably exists
| because of HyperCard. The idea that information can be
| hyperlinked together.
|
| Atkinson was a brilliant engineer. As critical to the launch of
| A Macintosh as anyone -- efficient rendering of regions,
| overlapping windows, etc.
|
| And last but not least, Mac Paint. Every computer painting
| program in existence owes Atkinson a nod.
| btilly wrote:
| The idea that information can be hyperlinked together
| predated HyperCard by decades. It goes back to
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
| we-m..., which was written in 1945. The same essay also has
| the fundamental ideas for a citation index.
|
| This gave rise both to the Science Citation Index and to
| various hypertext systems. For example the famous 1968
| presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY, now
| known as "The Mother of All Demos", demonstrated a working
| hypertext system among the other jaw-dropping
| accomplishments.
|
| HyperCard brought hypertext to commodity hardware. The Web
| made a distributed hypertext system viable. Google's PageRank
| recombined hypertext and the Science Citation Index to make
| the web more usable. And all of the key insights trace back
| to Vannevar Bush. Who was able to have such deep insights in
| 1945 because he had been working in, and thinking about,
| computing at least since 1927.
|
| The history of important ideas in computing generally goes
| far deeper than most programmers are aware.
| gdubs wrote:
| I'm not claiming the idea didn't exist but Atkinson's
| HyperCard turned it into a viable product and the creators
| of the web credited him for their inspiration.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It's not just the links, more importantly it had:
| on mouseDown answer "HyperTalk!" with "OK"
| end mouseDown
| jcynix wrote:
| > The idea that information can be hyperlinked together.
|
| HyperCard was really cool and I miss it. Its most important
| feature IMO was to enable non-programmers to rather easily
| author useful software. As happend with Excel.
|
| The idea that information can be hyperlinked is much older
| than HyperCard. Check out Ted Nelson and his
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu which predates
| HyperCard by more than a decade.
|
| And then there was the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics_Document_Examiner, or
| GNU Texinfo and its precursors besides many other attempts.
| zahlman wrote:
| Several previous top-level comments address Atkinson's
| accomplishments, but I agree with you in principle.
| justin66 wrote:
| People are showing you respect when they credit you with the
| ability to Google things yourself.
| iwontberude wrote:
| HyperCard was my introduction to programming. It was the first
| time I used a programming language on my mom's old Macintosh
| IIci. It really has been a long time. Thank you, Bill.
| bill_mcgonigle wrote:
| People today take the WIMP interface for granted and forget about
| the pioneers who invented it.
|
| It's really sad to see desktop apps adopt hamburger menus and
| things that make sense on mobile but make life harder on a
| desktop built for WIMP.
|
| Thank you, Bill! Some days I'd rather be using your interface.
| winterrx wrote:
| Rest in peace.
| empressplay wrote:
| HyperCard Simulator: https://hcsimulator.com ViperCard HyperCard
| re-imagining: https://www.vipercard.net/
| sgt wrote:
| HyperCard also inspired Myst (the game), if I recall correctly
| Uvix wrote:
| The initial (Mac-only) version of Myst was built in
| HyperCard.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Oh man, he's a legend. My condolences to any family members
| passing by in remembrance. My highest respect goes to those with
| the tenacity and character required to force a good idea into
| existence. Bill inspired many people. While reading about him in
| "Revolution in the Valley", it felt like it recalibrated my own
| personal compass and gave me a sense of purpose in my own
| endeavors.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779399
|
| DonHopkins on Dec 13, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| Bill Atkinson: Reflections on the 40th anniversary...
|
| I recently posted these thoughts about Bill Atkinson, and links
| to articles and a recent interview he gave to Brad Myers' user
| interface class at CMU:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726302
|
| Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically
| talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think
| they're on very different drugs. The Psychedelic Inspiration For
| Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.
|
| "In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium
| dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete
| park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...
|
| https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
|
| Full interview with lots more details about the development of
| HyperCard:
|
| https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...
|
| Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640
| Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:
|
| https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
|
| Including polaroids of early Lisa development.
|
| About PhotoCard:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110303033205/http://www.billat...
|
| PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the
| iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards
| using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send
| them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod
| touch.
|
| Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature
| photographer, has created an innovative application that
| redefines how people create and send postcards.
|
| With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards
| on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot,
| through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy
| to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos
| or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to
| type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with
| decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it
| can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your
| creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the
| world!
|
| pvg on Dec 13, 2019 | prev [-]
|
| Was this bit about LSD and Hypercard covered before what seems
| like a 2016 interview and some later articles? So much has been
| written about HyperCard (and MacPaint and QuickDraw) I'm
| wondering if I somehow managed to miss it in all that material.
|
| DonHopkins on Dec 13, 2019 | parent | next [-]
|
| As far as I know, the first time Bill Atkinson publically
| mentioned that LSD inspired HyperCard was in an interview with
| Leo Laporte on Apr 25th 2016, which claims to be "Part 2". I have
| searched all over for part 1 but have not been able to find it.
| Then Mondo 2000 published a transcript of that part of the
| interview on June 18 2018, and I think a few other publications
| repeated it around that time.
|
| And later on Feb 4, 2019 he gave a live talk to Brad Myers'
| "05-640: Interaction Techniques" user interface design class at
| CMU, during which he read the transcript.
|
| http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/schedule....
|
| It's well worth watching that interview. He went over and
| explained all of his amazing Polaroids of Lisa development, which
| I don't think have ever been published anywhere else.
|
| See Bill Atkinson's Lisa development polaroids:
|
| http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill_Atki...
|
| Then at 1:03:15 a student asked him the million dollar question:
| what was the impetus and motivation behind HyperCard? He
| chuckled, reached for the transcript he had off-camera, and then
| out of the blue he asked the entire class "How many of you guys
| have done ... a psychedelic?" (Brad reported "No hands", but I
| think some may have been embarrassed to admit it in front of
| their professor). So then Bill launched into reading the
| transcript of the LSD HyperCard story, and blew all the students'
| minds.
|
| See video of Bill's talk:
|
| https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
|
| The next week I gave a talk to the same class that Bill had just
| traumatized by asking if they'd done illegal drugs, and (at
| 37:11) I trolled them by conspiratorially asking: "One thing I
| wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ... (pregnant
| pause) ... HyperCard? Basically, because in 1987 I saw HyperCard,
| and it fucking blew my mind." Then I launched into my description
| of how important and amazing HyperCard was.
|
| See video of Don's talk:
|
| https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
|
| Here is an index of all of the videos from Brad Myers'
| interaction techniques class, including Rob Haitani (Palm Pilot),
| Shumin Zhai (text input and swipe method), Dan Bricklin
| (spreadsheets, Demo prototyping tool), Don Hopkins (pie menus),
| and Bill Atkinson (Mac, HyperCard):
|
| https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...
| ayaros wrote:
| A sad day for everyone. R.I.P. <3
| carlosdp wrote:
| I was just telling someone about the story of how he invented
| bitmapping for overlapping windows in the first Mac GUI in like
| two weeks, largely because he mis-remembered that being already a
| feature in the Xerox PARC demo and was _convinced_ it was already
| possible.
|
| RIP to a legend
| vercantez wrote:
| Wow. One of the absolute greatest. The world truly is a different
| place because of Bill. Bill's importance in the history of
| computing cannot be overstated. Hypercard is probably my favorite
| invention of his. So ahead of its time. Rest in peace Bill
| jonstewart wrote:
| I was just musing to a young team member the other day that I
| think OOP comes easy to me because I learned HyperCard (v1.2 on
| System 6 on an SE) at a young age. RIP.
| analog31 wrote:
| This was my experience too. My mom had a subscription to Byte
| Magazine, and I remember trying to read the articles on OOP
| when they came out. It was utterly opaque to me. When I started
| using HyperCard, the light bulb turned on.
|
| I think a subtle factor is that when learning HC (or Visual
| Basic, or LabVIEW), you started _using_ objects before you
| learned how to _create_ them. All of these packages came with
| lots of pre-written objects that were easy to use. In the case
| of VB, you had to buy a special version if you wanted to create
| your own objects, and very few people did.
|
| I think when teaching newer languages like Python, this is done
| as a matter of course. For instance if you show someone how to
| calculate a function and graph it, you're probably using
| objects from something like Matplotlib, before being shown how
| to create your own. And once again, among casual programmers,
| relatively few people define their own classes.
| malwrar wrote:
| This post is a really beautiful farewell, thanks author for
| including some examples of his work to smile at.
| THENATHE wrote:
| I know nothing about the fundamentals of "old computing" like
| what Mr. Atkinson worked on as I am only 27 and have much more
| contemporary experience. That being said, I still very greatly
| mourn the loss of these old head techs because the world of tech
| I use today would not have been possible if not for these
| incredibly smart and talented individuals. To learn to code
| without YouTube is truly a feat I could not imagine, and the
| world will be a lesser place without this kind of ingenuity.
| Hopefully he's making some computers in the sky a bit better!
| bombcar wrote:
| It's amazing to remember that there was an entire generation of
| computers and users for whom a _command line_ was a new and
| modern invention!
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I remember Bill from the halcyon days, surrounded by smoke and
| mirrors. Amazing individual -- rest in Peace
| blindriver wrote:
| Another death from pancreatic cancer. I really hope we can figure
| out why rates are skyrocketing because it is a silent killer and
| usually isn't detected until it's too late.
| jprd wrote:
| HyperCard opened my mind as a kid in a way that I couldn't grok
| until the first time I took Mushrooms. What a genius.
| djmips wrote:
| I'm a little shook. A hero to many GenX coders I'm sure - I'm one
| of them. What a legend.
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