[HN Gopher] Bill Atkinson has died
___________________________________________________________________
Bill Atkinson has died
https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10238073579963378&...
Author : romanhn
Score : 1529 points
Date : 2025-06-07 16:19 UTC (1 days 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.
| worik wrote:
| Imagine being the manager that had to assess Bill
| Atkinson's productivity!
|
| > Final results alone are measurable
|
| Not even those, for individuals
|
| Mostly we work in teams. I myself like to work in
| "plumbing" that is arbitrarily far from "final results"
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| > Shorter, faster, and fastest time to completion is best.
|
| What about correctness, robustness, readability, clarity,
| maintainability?
| 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, may be the best.
| bombcar wrote:
| This shows amazing foresight on Bill's part. It would have
| been easy for all that to be lost.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Here is a video of Bill showing and discussing those
| Polaroids: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0mHFcB510
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| What other stripe would there be to refer to? I haven't
| seen anything like that here.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Check the site now. HN has a "flag at half-mast" feature
| for when tech visionaries are freed by the great GC of
| the cosmos.
| zahlman wrote:
| Ah, I had to change topcolor _back_ to notice....
| 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.
| leakycap wrote:
| I miss the days of For Dummies, Bibles, and all the rest.
| If you'd read that thing carefully a few times, you usually
| knew your stuff. There was a finish line.
|
| Modern continual versioning and constant updates means
| there is no finish line. No Bible could ever be printed.
| Ah, nostalgia.
| 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.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| A blog post about Tripod/Ruby/VB history -
| https://retool.com/visual-basic Cooper's
| solution to this problem didn't click until late 1987,
| when a friend at Microsoft brought him along on a sales
| call with an IT manager at Bank of America. The manager
| explained that he needed Windows to be usable by all of
| the bank's employees: highly technical systems
| administrators, semi-technical analysts, and even users
| entirely unfamiliar with computers, like tellers. Cooper
| recalls the moment of inspiration: In an
| instant, I perceived the solution to the shell design
| problem: it would be a shell construction set--a tool
| where each user would be able to construct exactly the
| shell that they needed for their unique mix of
| applications and training. Instead of me telling the
| users what the ideal shell was, they could design their
| own, personalized ideal shell.
|
| Thus was born Tripod, Cooper's shell construction kit.
| 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....
| leakycap wrote:
| https://ruffle.rs/ recently came to my attention when I
| needed to resuscitate a back into tool that had been
| completely built in Macromedia products
| 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
| rezmason wrote:
| You're right. Flash and its legacy would have been better
| if it had built in "Edit Source".
|
| The earliest Flash projects were these artful assemblages
| of scripts dangling from nested timelines, like an
| Alexander Calder mobile. They were at times labyrinthine,
| like they are in many similar tools, but there were ways to
| mitigate that. Later on, AS3 code was sometimes written
| like Java, because we wanted to be taken seriously.
|
| Many Flash community members _wanted_ to share their
| source, _wanted_ a space where interested people could make
| changes. We did the best we could, uploading FLA files and
| zipped project directories. None of it turned out to be
| especially resilient.
|
| It's one of the things I admire about Scratch. If you want,
| you can peek inside, and it's all there, for you to learn
| from and build off of, with virtually no arbitrary barriers
| in place.
| RossBencina wrote:
| Pretty sure the next after Hypercard was Macromind (later
| Macromedia) Director. I recall running an early version of a
| Director animation on a black and white Mac not long after I
| started playing with Hypercard. Later I was a Director
| developer. I recall when Future Splash released -- the fast
| scaling vector graphics were a new and impressive thing. The
| web browser plugin helped a lot and it really brought
| multimedia to the browser. It was only later that Macromedia
| acquired Future Splash and renamed it Flash.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| - Minecraft - Roblox - LittleBigPlanet - Mario Maker
|
| This is what kids do to be creative.
|
| Slightly more serious (and therefore less succesful): -
| Logo/Turtle Graphics - Scratch - HyperStudio
|
| HyperCard was both graphic design and hypertext (links).
| These two modalities got separated, and I think there are
| practical reasons for that. Because html/css design actually
| sucks and never became an amateur art form.
|
| For writing and publishing we got Wiki, Obsidian et al, Blogs
| (RIP), forums, social media. Not meant to be interactive or
| programmable, but these fulfill people's needs for
| publishing.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yeah, that sums things up well --- the problem of course is
| what happens when one works on a project which blurs
| boundaries.
|
| I had to drop into BlockSCAD to rough out an arc algorithm
| for my current project:
|
| https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
|
| (see the subsubsection "Arcs for toolpaths and DXFs")
|
| Jupyter Notebooks come close to allowing a seamless
| blending of text and algorithm, but they are sorely missing
| on the graphic design and vector graphics front --- which
| now that I write that, makes me realize that that is the
| big thing which I miss when trying to use them. Makes me
| wish for JuMP, a Jupyter Notebook which incorporates
| METAPOST --- if it also had an interactive drawing mode, it
| would be perfect.... (for my needs).
| jonnytran wrote:
| Have you seen Scrappy? It's still early, but it's the most
| interesting thing I've seen in a while.
|
| https://pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/
| 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.
| ebcode wrote:
| IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse
| over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I
| think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk
| when created JavaScript.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| Wasn't the pointer always a hand in HyperCard?
| WillAdams wrote:
| Depended on context, and what the stack programmer set it
| to. Possibilities (per Fig. 51-1 in _The Complete
| Hypercard Handbook, 2nd edition_ were:
|
| - watch
|
| - busy
|
| - hand
|
| - arrow
|
| - iBeam
|
| - cross
|
| - plus
| jjcob wrote:
| JavaScript felt like it took the best parts of C (concise
| expressiveness) and the ease of use of HyperTalk (event
| handlers, easy hierarchical access to objects, etc). It was
| pretty sweet.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| I honestly don't think the modern web is a legitimate
| hypertext system at this point. It was already bad enough 20
| years ago with flash and serverside CGI but now most of the
| major websites are just serving JavaScript programs that then
| fetch data using a dedicated API. And then there's all the
| paywalls and constant CAPTCHA checks to make sure you aren't
| training an LLM off _their_ content without a license.
|
| Look up hyperland, it's a early 90s documentary by Douglas
| Adams and the guy from doctor who about the then-future
| hypermedia revolution. I can remember the web resembling that
| a long time ago but the modern web is very far removed from
| anything remotely resembling hypertext.
| WillAdams wrote:
| This is discussed a bit in the book:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192405005-hypermedia-
| sys...
|
| which maybe argues for a return to early ideas of the web
| as a successor to Hypercard...
| 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.
| garyrob wrote:
| "In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither
| and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web..."
|
| In yet another alternate timeline, someone thought to add
| something like URLs with something like GET, PUT, etc. to
| HyperCard, and Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the Web browser
| never happened because Hypercard already did it all.
| jandrese wrote:
| On one hand this would be simply amazing, on the other hand
| it would have been a total security nightmare that makes
| early Javascript look like a TPM Secure Enclave.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Those who were there will remember: on
| openbackground --merryxmas merryxmas "on
| openbackground --merryxmas" end openbackground
|
| (And now I'm curious if this post will trip anyone's
| antivirus software...)
| moffkalast wrote:
| Looking at the HyperTalk syntax [0] it's interesting how we
| take left hand variable assignment as a given while math
| typically teaches the exact opposite since you can't really
| write the answer before you have the question.
|
| Makes you think if lambda expressions would be more consistent
| with the rest if they were reversed.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Fundamental_operatio...
| jjcob wrote:
| We kind of had that for a time with FileMaker and MS Access.
| People could build pretty amazing stuff with those apps, even
| without being a programmer.
|
| I think the reason those apps never became mainstream is that
| they didn't have a good solution for sharing data. There were
| some ways you could use them to access database servers, but
| setting them up was so difficult that they were for all intents
| and purposes limited to local, single user programs.
|
| HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL had a learning curve, but you could
| easily make multi-user programs with them. That's why the web
| won.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| Yes! I used FileMaker a lot, and built my first journaling
| system with it. Like a cross between hypercard and a wiki. It
| really changed my life and this lead to programming.
| specialist wrote:
| Yes. They didn't survive the transition from workgroup
| (shared files on a LAN) to client/server.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| the stuff I made in Access (and later Excel) looks a lot like
| the stuff I generate with AI these days!
| asnyder wrote:
| His legacy still exists and continues today. Even updated to
| modern sensibilities, cross-platform, and compatible with all
| your legacy Hypercard stacks!
|
| As far as I remember, progression was Hypercard -> Metacard ->
| Runtime Revolution -> Livecode.
|
| https://livecode.com
|
| I was a kid when this progression first happened, my older
| brother Tuviah Snyder (now at Apple), was responsible for much
| of these updates and changes first at Metacard and then at its
| acquirer Runtime Revolution.
|
| I even wrote some of my first programs as Hypercard compatible
| stacks. Was quite fun to see my apps on download.com, back in
| the day when that meant something :).
|
| I always joked it required please and thank you due to its
| verbosity, but was super simple, accessible, and worked!
|
| How nice, that even today one can take their legacy Hypercard
| Stacks and run them in the web, mobile, etc. Or create
| something new in what was more structured vibecoding before
| vibecoding :).
| mort96 wrote:
| This seems like something completely different? Livecode
| looks like just another toolkit or SDK for developing
| standalone apps, which might be great for the handful of
| developers using it but certainly doesn't do anything to re-
| shape how users interact with their computers
| asnyder wrote:
| Nope, is completely the same base. Scroll the homepage, and
| you'll see an example of Livecode (updated HyperTalk).
|
| You can open your HyperCard stacks, or MetaCard stacks, or
| Runtime/Livecode Stacks in their IDE, code, edit, etc,
| similar to what you would have back in Hypercard days, but
| with modern features, updates, and additions.
|
| It's backwards compatible with HyperTalk, its current
| language is an updated HyperTalk (i.e. an updated
| MetaTalk), that incorporates all that was, but adds new
| features for today.
|
| Your Livecode apps can be deployed and run as cross-
| platform desktop applications (Mac, Win, *nix) , mobile
| applications, and as far as I remember, web applications
| with HTML5 deployment (so they say).
|
| Not affiliated with them in any way, just sharing my
| understanding and memories.
| jostylr wrote:
| There is hypersrcipt: https://hyperscript.org which claims a
| descent from hypercard and certainly embraces the web.
|
| Also, this might happen in a few years if AI improves enough to
| be trusted to make things by novices. Hard to imagine, but just
| maybe.
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| In contrast to some house plants that are meticulously
| watered and cared for in perfect conditions, and yet they
| still die in a week.
| 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.
| atombender wrote:
| So when the OS needs to refresh a portion of the screen
| (e.g. everything behind a top window that was closed),
| what happens?
|
| My guess is it asks each application that overlapped
| those areas to redraw only those areas (in case the app
| is able to be smart about redrawing incrementally), and
| also clips the following redraw so that any draw
| operations issued by the app can be "culled". If an app
| isn't smart and just redraws everything, the clipping can
| still eliminate a lot of the draw calls.
| 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.
| scripturial wrote:
| I remember coding games for the C64 with an 8 sprite
| limit, and having to swap sprites in and out for the top
| and bottom half of the screen to get more than 8.
| 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?)
| peter303 wrote:
| Frame buffer memory was still incredibly expensive in 1980.
| Our labs 512 x 512 x 8bit table lookup color buffer cost
| $30,000 in 1980. Mac's 512 x 384 x 8bit buffer in 1984 had to
| fit the Macs $2500 price. The Xerox Alto was earlier than
| these two devices and would have cost even more if it had a
| full frame buffer.
| sroussey wrote:
| Wasn't the original Mac at 512 x 342 x 1bit?
| mkl wrote:
| Yes: https://512pixels.net/2025/05/original-macintosh-
| resolution/
|
| There was a discussion here a couple of weeks ago (with a
| typo in the title):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44110219
| 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.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Yes, and thankful for these. Good addition.
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Thanks for digging deeper.
| gblargg wrote:
| The key seems to have been recognizing the utility of the
| region concept and making it fundamental to the QuickDraw API
| (and the clever representation that made finding the main
| rectangular portions easy). This insulated QuickDraw from the
| complexity of windowing system operations. Once you go
| implementing region operations you probably find that it's
| fairly efficient to work out the major rectangular regions so
| you can use normal graphics operations on them, leaving small
| areas that can just be done inefficiently as a bunch of tiny
| rectangles. All this work for clipped graphics was applicable
| to far more than just redrawing obscured window content, so
| it could justify more engineering time to polishing it. Given
| how easy they were to use, more things could leverage the
| optimization (e.g. using them to redraw only the dirty region
| when a window was uncovered).
| 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.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I got a look at an early version of StarCraft source code
| as a reference for the sound library for Diablo 2 and
| curiosity made me do a quick analysis of the other stuff -
| they used a very naive approach to C++ and object
| inheritance to which first time C++ programmers often fall
| victim. It might have been their first C++ project so they
| probably needed to start over again anyways. We had an
| edict on Diablo 2 to make the C++ look like recognizable C
| for Dave Brevik's benefit which turned out pretty well I
| think (it was a year late but we shipped).
| genewitch wrote:
| Diablo II is in my top 3 games of all time, i still play
| it all the time. Thanks for contributing so much fun to
| my life!
|
| (for ref, diablo III is also in my top 3 :)
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I was only one of many programmers at Blizzard North +
| others at Blizzard and our parent company at the time,
| but you are welcome from me.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What exactly did they do that was naive?
| Grosvenor wrote:
| Michael Abrash's black book of graphics programming. They
| heard about a "buffer", so implemented the only non-stupid
| thing - a write FIFO. Turns out the competition had done the
| most stupid thing and built a read buffer.
|
| I teach this lesson to my mentees. Knowing that something is
| possible gives you significant information. Also, don't brag
| - It gives away significant information.
|
| Just knowing something is possible makes it much, much easier
| to achieve.
|
| https://valvedev.info/archives/abrash/abrash.pdf
| bogantech wrote:
| > Turns out the competition had done the most stupid thing
| and built a read buffer
|
| This isn't really stupid though as explained in the pdf
|
| > Paradise had stuck a read FIFO between display memory and
| the video output stage of the VGA, allowing the video
| output to read ahead, so that when the CPU wanted to access
| display memory, pixels could come from the FIFO while the
| CPU was serviced immediately. That did indeed help
| performance--but not as much as Tom's write FIFO.
|
| VRAM accesses are contended, so during the visual display
| period the VGA circuitry has priority. CPU accesses result
| in wait states - a FIFO between the VRAM and the VGA means
| less contention and more cycles for CPU accesses
|
| Why improve read performance though? Games accessing VRAM I
| presume would be 99% write. Perhaps it was to improve
| performance in GUIs like Windows?
| 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.
| rezmason wrote:
| I like how he pronounces "pix-els", learning how we arrived
| at our current pronunciation is the kind of computer history
| I can't get enough of
| 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.
| II2II wrote:
| It's a good description, but I'm going to add a couple of
| details since details that are obvious to someone who lived
| through that era may not be obvious to those who came
| after.
|
| > Obviously it could have not been a mask of pixels
|
| To be more specific about your explanation of too much
| memory: many early GUIs were 1 bit-per-pixel, so the
| bitmask would use the same amount of memory as the window
| contents.
|
| There was another advantage to the complexity of only
| drawing regions: the OS could tell the application when a
| region was exposed, so you only had to redraw a region if
| it was exposed and needed an update _or_ it was just
| exposed. Unless you were doing something complex and could
| justify buffering the results, you were probably re-
| rendering it. (At least that is my recollections from
| making a Mandelbrot fractal program for a compact Mac,
| several decades back.)
| gblargg wrote:
| And even ignoring memory requirements, an uncompressed
| bitmap mask would have taken a lot of time to process
| (especially considering when combining regions where one
| was not a multiple of 8 pixels shifted with respect to
| the other. With just the horizontal coordinates of
| inversions, it takes the same amount of time for a region
| 8 pixels wide and 800 pixels wide, given the same shape
| complexity.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > But how was the region implemented?
|
| The source code describes it as "an unpacked array of
| sorted inversion points". If you can read 68k assembly,
| here's the implementation of PtInRgn:
|
| https://github.com/historicalsource/supermario/blob/9dd3c4b
| e...
| giovannibajo1 wrote:
| Yeah those are the horizontal spans I was referring to.
|
| It's a sorted list of X coordinates (left to right). If
| you group them in couples, they are begin/end intervals
| of pixels within region (visibles), but it's actually
| more useful to manipulate them as a flat array, as I
| described.
|
| I studied a bit the code and each scanline is prefixed by
| the Y coordinates, and uses an out of bounds terminator
| (32767).
| duskwuff wrote:
| It's a bit more than that. The list of X coordinates is
| cumulative - once an X coordinate has been marked as an
| inversion, it continues to be treated as an inversion on
| all Y coordinates below that, not just until the next Y
| coordinate shows up. (This manifests in the code as D3
| never being reset within the NOTRECT loop.) This makes it
| easier to perform operations like taking the union of two
| disjoint regions - the sets of points are simply sorted
| and combined.
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Atkinson at this timestamp:
| https://youtu.be/JQymn5flcek?si=2TMJ8b9zsR_Kitj-&t=1297
|
| Also, it's here in the documentary that someone expresses the
| excitement anticipating the smart phone. It's hard to watch for
| me now and not shake my head, "Oh, it's not quite as wonderful
| as you imagined."
| 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
| 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:
| You're right about the timing.
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I like that idea. I should start watching eBay.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| You would also remove the microlenses, which increase
| sensitivity.
| fractallyte wrote:
| I've had the same journey, and opted instead for a Sigma
| Foveon camera.
|
| Comparisons and advantages:
| https://www.photigy.com/school/sigma-foveon-sensor-review-
| dp...
|
| For black and white photography, the best high-end camera
| _seemed_ to be the Leica M Monochrom
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_M_Monochrom), but to
| my mind, it's trounced by the Foveon:
|
| https://youtu.be/OODMWXX_N7A
|
| https://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2013/01/14/quick-
| comparison-l...
|
| THIS is the photo that really sold it for me:
|
| https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1806915/0&year=2023
| #...
|
| That's from a modified DP1m, but the SD Quattro H has an
| easily-removable IR filter and a _huge_ sensor.
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, but it's also "talking shop". I'm sure Bill preferred
| it to talking about his Quickdraw days.
| Aloha wrote:
| You always lose something when doing optical printing - you can
| often gain things too, but its not 1:1.
|
| I adore this hybrid workflow, because I can pick how the photo
| will look, color palate, grain, whatever by picking my film,
| then I can use digital to fix (most if not all of) the inherent
| limitations in analog film.
|
| Sadly, film is too much of a pain today, photography has long
| been about composition for me, not cameras or process - I liked
| film because I got a consistent result, but I can use digital
| too, and I do today.
| hugs wrote:
| "When art critics get together they talk about form and
| structure and meaning. When artists get together they talk
| about where you can buy cheap turpentine."
| tejtm wrote:
| -- Picasso
| rezmason wrote:
| > I have been kicking myself for some time not just chatting
| with him about ... whatever.
|
| Maybe I should show some initiative! See, for a little while
| now I've wanted to just chat with _you_ about whatever.
|
| At this moment I'm working on a little research project about
| the advent of color on the Macintosh, specifically the color
| picker. Would you be interested in a casual convo that touches
| on that? If so, I can create a BlueSky account and reach out to
| you over there. :)
|
| https://merveilles.town/deck/@rezmason/114586460712518867
| diskzero wrote:
| John is cool, but I don't think he was around when the
| Macintosh II software and hardware was being designed for
| color support. I did work with Eric Ringewald at Be and he
| was one of the Color Quickdraw engineers. He would be fun to
| talk to. Michael Dhuey worked on the hardware of the Mac II
| platform. I guess we can give some credit to Jean-Louis
| Gassee as well. Try to talk to those people! I got to work
| with a lot of these Apple legends at General Magic, Be, Eazel
| and then back at Apple again. I never got to work on a
| project with JKCalhoun directly, but I did walk by his office
| quite frequently.
| rezmason wrote:
| > I never got to work on a project with JKCalhoun directly,
| but I did walk by his office quite frequently.
|
| Did you ever get hit with a paper airplane as you did? ;)
|
| Thanks for this reply, and if you're who I think you are,
| thank you for all the good work you did alongside these
| other folks :D
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| True. I showed up at Apple in '95 after Color Quickdraw was
| already a thing.
|
| Hilariously though, I did get handed the color pickers to
| "port" to PowerPC. In fact one of the first times I thought
| I was in over my head being at Apple was when I was staring
| at 68030 assembly and thinking, "Fuck, I have to rewrite
| this in C perhaps."
|
| From your username, I feel like we've chatted before (but I
| don't know your real name).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| We can certainly chat.
| sneak 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._
|
| Duchamp would like a word.
|
| Seriously though, as someone this describes to a T (though
| "suddenly" in this case is about 19 years), I was afraid to
| call myself any sort of artist for well over a decade, thinking
| I was just acquiring signal with high end gear. I didn't want
| to try to present myself as something I'm not. After all, I
| just push the button, the camera does all the work.
|
| I now have come to realize that this attitude is toxic and
| unnecessary. Art (even bad art!) doesn't need more gatekeeping
| or gatekeepers.
|
| I am a visual artist. A visual artist with perhaps better
| equipment than my skill level or talent justifies, but a visual
| artist nonetheless.
| herodotus wrote:
| Bill showed up at one of the WWDCs (2011?). I sat next to him
| during a lunch, not knowing who he was! He told me his name,
| and then showed me some photos he had taken. He seemed to me to
| be a gentle and kind soul. So sad to read this news.
| 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.
| bicepjai wrote:
| Please give a modern day metaphor or similar feature for
| HyperCard
| 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!)
| cess11 wrote:
| Perhaps!
| happycube wrote:
| CHM posted MacPaint and QuickDraw source:
| https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour...
| cxr wrote:
| In the corresponding interview, Bill makes several pointed
| remarks that the state of the code published--or at least he
| code as it was when presented to him for comment--is not his
| QuickDraw code.
|
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGIIwyJ7G94>
| 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.
| gdubs wrote:
| I'm pretty obsessed with these 'branches not taken'
| concepts in computing. Like, everything is the same today.
| And there's good usability arguments that things shouldn't
| be different for the sake of being different. But, there
| are so many forgotten concepts of the past that were
| arguably much more powerful, simple, expressive ways to
| interact with machines.
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| The NYT credits him with inventing the double click.[1]
|
| [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-
| atkinson-...
| jcynix wrote:
| Maybe the NYT should check Wikipedia first:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-click
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| And it was preceded by _The Manhole_ which was billed as
| "Where Alice would have gone if she had 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| >And once again, among casual programmers, relatively few
| people define their own classes.
|
| I find that I'm less interested in defining my own classes
| today than I was 10 or so years ago.
| https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/352/ left a
| big impression on me (though I didn't see it until a fair bit
| after the fact).
| 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.
| ksec wrote:
| He is 74. I think Age has more to do with it.
| 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.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Did that single experience with mushrooms change you forever,
| or was your insight transient?
| djmips wrote:
| I'm a little shook. A hero to many GenX coders I'm sure - I'm one
| of them. What a legend.
| mjbamford wrote:
| I never met Bill, and he never knew I existed, but he has had
| such a huge impact on my career, my family and my prosperity. I
| started my programming passion on the Apple II and switch to the
| Mac in 1984 after seeing MacPaint. Hypercard was very impactful
| on my logical thinking, paraded the incredibility of
| possibilities from this machine, and taught me how to
| conceptualise information. His humble efforts have had such a
| profound affect. I'm so very full of grief upon hearing this
| news.
| brentjanderson wrote:
| Bill's contribution with HyperCard is of course legendary. Apart
| from the experience of classrooms and computer labs in elementary
| schools, it was also the primary software powering a fusion of
| bridge-simulator-meets-live-action-drama field trips (among many
| other things) for over 20 years at the Space Center in central
| Utah.[0] I was one of many beneficiaries of this program as a
| participant, volunteer, and staff member. It was among the best
| things I've ever done.
|
| That seed crystal of software shaped hundreds of thousands of
| students that to this day continue to rave about this program
| (although the last bits of HyperCard retired permanently about 12
| years ago, nowadays it's primarily web based tech).
|
| HyperCard's impact on teaching students to program starship
| simulators, and then telling compelling, interactive, immersive,
| multi-player dramatic stories in those ships is something enabled
| by Atkinson's dream in 1985.
|
| May your consciousness journey between infinite pools of light,
| Bill.
|
| Also, if you've read this far, go donate to Pancreatic Cancer
| research.[1]
|
| [0]: https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org [1]:
| https://pancan.org
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| Is that stack available anywhere? Or do you have a copy?
| brentjanderson wrote:
| Sadly, most of them are lost to time. There's one that I'm
| aware of at https://archive.org/details/hypercard_voyager-
| engineer-new is just one station of about 15 from one of the
| ships.
|
| https://thoriumsim.com is a modern incarnation of the same
| software.
| yardie wrote:
| The Mac, Hypercard, MacPaint, and General Magic he's one of the
| few engineers who's such a substantial impact on my life. Rest in
| Peace.
| bhk wrote:
| There were giants in the Earth in those days...
| bhouston wrote:
| Why are so many original Apple people dying of pancreatic cancer?
| Is it that common and this a coincidence?
| koops wrote:
| Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld were my childhood heroes through
| their work. Inside Macintosh was a series that enlightened my
| teen years. Thanks, Bill.
| solarized wrote:
| Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rojiun.
| lutusp wrote:
| My time with Atkinson came before the Macintosh, before
| Hypercard. As a company Apple was struggling and we were
| preparing for what, in retrospect, was the really terrible Apple
| III. It was a less optimistic time -- after the Apple II and
| before the Macintosh.
|
| A digression: the roster of Apple-related pancreatic cancer
| victims is getting longer -- Jef Raskin (2005), Steve Jobs
| (2011), now Bill Atkinson (2025). The overall pancreatic cancer
| occurrence rate is 14 per 100,000, so such a cluster is
| surprising within a small group, but the scientist in me wants to
| argue that it's just a coincidence, signifying nothing.
|
| Maybe it's the stress of seeing how quickly one's projects become
| historical footnotes, erased by later events. And maybe it's
| irrational to expect anything else.
| tw1984 wrote:
| Steve Jobs had pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, which is not
| the traditional form of the pancreatic cancer people usually
| talk about. It is far less aggressive and completely treatable,
| in fact almost 100% curable as Jobs had it diagnosed at such an
| early stage.
| ip26 wrote:
| If there was a link, I would be thinking about all the
| superfund sites in Silicon Valley, pondering the manufacture of
| the Apple II, or whether there was an unusually strong smoking
| culture at young Apple Computer, rather than some unique mental
| stress of the job.
| erksa wrote:
| Not just a huge influence w/ Apple. Bill Atkinson was a dedicated
| photographer who did a lot to help bring the idea of sharing
| memories together.
|
| He and his associated printed and sent tons of photography all
| around the world.
|
| The was loved among photographers as well.
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photocard-by-bill-atkinson/id3...
| pmoriarty wrote:
| More of his photos can be found at https://billatkinson.com/
| beagle3 wrote:
| Thanks, Bill. Rest in Peace.
|
| I was amazed by Bill's software seeing it on a Mac back then -
| MacPaint mostly, then HyperCard. I was not even 10, but I was
| already programming, and spent hours trying to figure out how to
| implement MacPaint's Lasso on my humble ZX Spectrum. (With some
| success, but not quite as elegant...)
|
| If you want to experience HyperCard, John Earnest (RodgerTheGreat
| on HN[0]) built Decker[1] that runs on both the web and natively,
| and captures the aesthetic and most stuff perfectly. It uses Lil
| as a programming language - it is different than HyperTalk, but
| beautiful in its own right. (It doesn't read as English quite the
| way HyperTalk does, but it is more regular and easier to write -
| it's a readable/writable vector language, quite unlike those
| other ones ...)
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RodgerTheGreat
|
| [1] https://beyondloom.com/decker/
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| FatBits was life altering for me.
| jnaina wrote:
| A sad for me.
|
| I spent countless hours building HyperCard stacks and creating
| artwork in MacPaint, in college. A true legend.
|
| RIP. Fat Bits forever.
| yreg wrote:
| "How many man-years did it take to write QuickDraw?", the Byte
| magazine reporter asked Steve.
|
| Steve turned to look at Bill. "Bill, how long did you spend
| writing Quickdraw?"
|
| "Well, I worked on it on and off for four years", Bill replied.
|
| Steve paused for a beat and then turned back to the Byte
| reporter. "Twenty-four man-years. We invested twenty-four man-
| years in QuickDraw."
|
| Obviously, Steve figured that one Atkinson year equaled six man
| years, which may have been a modest estimate.
|
| http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Mythical_Man_Year.txt
| tdhz77 wrote:
| I asked Bill if he thought I could become an engineer even after
| earning my degree in sociology and political science. I really
| enjoyed writing software at the time but had no formal training.
| He laughed as he did and said of course, and you will be better
| than most. He found it as a strength and not a weakness. I will
| miss him.
| vovavili wrote:
| These degrees tend to prepare you quite well for programming,
| since at top-tier universities they are quite heavy on use of R
| and statistical modelling.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I'm willing to be a cup of coffee that the OP's degree and
| Atkinson's advice preceded the existence of R. I'm going to
| excerpt a mid-80's interview of Butler Lampson from Susan
| Lammer's book 'Programmers At Work' to illustrate my guess at
| what Atkinson might've been thinking...
|
| LAMPSON: I used to think that undergraduate computer-science
| education was bad, and that it should be outlawed. Recently I
| realized that position isn't reasonable. An undergraduate
| degree in computer science is a perfectly respectable
| professional degree, just like electrical engineering or
| business administration. But I do think it's a serious
| mistake to take an undergraduate degree in computer science
| if you intend to study it in graduate school.
|
| INTERVIEWER: Why?
|
| LAMPSON: Because most of what you learn won't have any long-
| term significance. You won't learn new ways of using your
| mind, which does you more good than learning the details of
| how to write a compiler, which is what you're likely to get
| from undergraduate computer science. I think the world would
| be much better off if all the graduate computer-science
| departments would get together and agree not to accept
| anybody with a bachelor's degree in computer science. Those
| people should be required to take a remedial year to learn
| something respectable like mathematics or history, before
| going on to graduate-level computer science. However, I don't
| see that happening.
| leakycap wrote:
| I truly believe Mr. Atkinson's dedication to his craft was part
| of the reason I and so many others loved the Mac and got into
| computers
|
| I will continue to admire him and his way of problem solving,
| speaking about your past work -- successes and lessons learned
| kabdib wrote:
| the source code of quickdraw is art
| mathattack wrote:
| "What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us."
|
| What a tribute! He was famous at the time, though now perhaps an
| unsung hero in leading us into a GUI world.
| brador wrote:
| Pancreatic cancer. That's what got Steve too.
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