Bill Atkinson passed away on 5th June. He was on the original Apple Macintosh development team, and was the creator of Quickdraw, MacPaint and Hypercard amongst many other things. I have fond memories of spending endless hours making things with Hypercard, and in a world that was pre-internet Hypercard showed what was to come. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee mentioned HyperCard was an inspiration for the World Wide Web.
One of my favourite stories about Bill 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 naïveté”, 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.”
Truely an amazing programmer and an amazing person. I’d recommend watching Triangulation episode 244 with Bill and Leo Laporte to hear him share some of his life stories.