Bill Atkinson Concepts

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

by Jon Krakauer · 25 Aug 2009 · 283pp · 98,673 words

to work for Alp Sports, a local manufacturer of climbing equipment. “He started out doing odd jobs, working a sewing machine, things like that,” remembers Bill Atkinson, now an accomplished climber and guide, who also worked at Alp Sports at the time. “But because of Rob’s impressive organizational skills, which were

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Trekking for their assistance in the wake of the tragedy. For providing inspiration, hospitality, friendship, information, and sage advice, I’m grateful to Tom Hornbein, Bill Atkinson, Madeleine David, Steve Gipe, Don Peterson, Martha Kongsgaard, Peter Goldman, Rebecca Roe, Keith Mark Johnson, Jim Clash, Muneo Nukita, Helen Trueman, Steve Swenson, Conrad Anker

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything

by Steven Levy · 2 Feb 1994 · 244pp · 66,599 words

thinking about matters both Mac and non-Mac. I am especially grateful to the help far beyond the call of duty to Mac Team members Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, and Susan Kare, who have always been there for me when I needed them. They also helped produce a

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I had interviewed said, "Wait till you meet Bill and Andy," as if this would certify the special nature of the Macintosh experience. I met Bill Atkinson first. A tall fellow with unruly hair, a Pancho Villa mustache, and blazing blue eyes, he had the unnerving intensity of Bruce Dern in one

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doing and just see pretty dancing things on the screen." The eight representatives of Apple were ushered into a demo room. There were Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson, Apple's president Mike Scott, and various executives and engineers on the Lisa project. Tesler flicked on the Alto. The paradigm of augmentation came alive

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, despairing of Xerox ever getting its act together, he left PARC to seek employment in the personal computer world. At Apple, of course. Tesler recalled Bill Atkinson sitting with his face almost pressed against the screen. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs could hardly contain himself with excitement. After he watched Tesler manipulate the screen

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the goods), he nearly exploded. "Why aren't you doing anything with this?" he bellowed. "This is the greatest thing! This is revolutionary!" Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson, and the others walked out that day with something much more valuable than diamonds, treasury bills, or even gold bullion. A paradigm. By the time

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to change the world with the ideas to which they had just been exposed. How long do you think it will take? Steve Jobs asked Bill Atkinson. ''About six months," Atkinson replied. He was only off by three years or so. At the time of the Xerox visit, Apple Computer, Inc., had

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inherently interesting-the concept had always been a thorough integration of text and graphics. Lisa's most promising feature thus far was the work of Bill Atkinson-fast software routines for bit-mapped graphic output. Atkinson had also, over the objection of some of the hardware engineers on the project, successfully lobbied

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PARC to open a business called Mouse House ("Purveyors of Fine Digital Mice to an Exclusive Clientele since 1975"). They dubbed it the "clandestine mouse." Bill Atkinson quickly hacked a driver program that allowed the mouse to move a cursor on the computer screen. Jobs and Hawkins proceeded to dazzle skeptics with

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few years before had operated out of a garage. Apple's task was to take this technology out of the lab and into general circulation. Bill Atkinson quickly learned how difficult this would be. His job on the project was to generate the routines that would control the display-the software equivalent

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was simple- a fourteen-year-old could do it. But Bill wanted it simpler," Tesler later recalled. Tesler's comment reveals the extent to which Bill Atkinson influenced the design of Lisa's human interface. Because Atkinson wrote the software that controlled the objects on the screen-the visual part of the

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a list of words representing a command that will be enacted when the cursor finds its way over the proper word. As it turns out, Bill Atkinson did not originally plan for a menu bar on top of the screen. It sort of migrated upward, like cream rising to the top. Atkinson

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example of technology. They hailed Jobs, and wrote glowingly as well about Lisa's project manager, John Couch. (They wrote almost nothing about key designers Bill Atkinson or Rich Page.) Everyone agreed that Lisa represented the future. But not the future of Apple. That would belong to a smaller project, working to

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was its lack of modes. In early 1979, Raskin was working with the Lisa group-he had, in fact, recruited one of his former students, Bill Atkinson, as its star programmer. (At De San Diego, Atkinson had been a participant in guerrilla theater productions organized by Raskin.) As Raskin tells it, he

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Lana Turner's possibly apocryphal presence at Schwab's Drugstore. Both were waiting for stardom to tap them on the shoulder. Both got their wishes. Bill Atkinson was one who put Smith and Raskin together. He brought the young engineer to Raskin's house one night, and said, "Here's the guy

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same CPU chip that the Lisa used, the considerably more expensive Motorola 68000 processor. Bud Tribble, who was aware of the fantastic things his friend Bill Atkinson was writing for the Lisa team, urged that the Macintosh team follow suit. Tribble knew that, to some degree, he was betraying Raskin with this

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scale a fresh learning curve. Macintosh would change that. The Lisa interface would be adapted and taken a step further. In the same way that Bill Atkinson became the key interface person on the Lisa-he wrote the software that controlled the screen-Andy Hertzfeld took on this role for Macintosh. Since

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only a fraction of the Lisa's hardware resources." And since Andy admired Atkinson's work, and disdained most of the other Lisa engineers', "Anything Bill Atkinson did, I took, and nothing else." Hertzfeld had another guiding principle for his decisions-the spirit of the Apple II. In his view, Macintosh was

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that it won't be great. It means you can fail, but because you're really great you're willing to take on that risk." Bill Atkinson understood Jobs's methodology as a Darwinian principle that led to insane greatness. "Either people grow into [the pressure] and become great, or they go

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were stuck in the H P mindset: a conservative ethos designed to produce dependable, competent technology. This affected even the exceptions to the general demeanor: Bill Atkinson later admitted that he and his more daring colleagues "were afraid of our [corporate] customers-we didn't want to offend them. We erred on

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text in fine resolution. Several schemes for disk drives were adopted and discarded. Frustration mounted with each delay. People complained of "constant time toward completion." Bill Atkinson later compared it to running a nightmarish footrace where, each time you approach the finish line, some unseen force catapults it a huge increment beyond

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software design squad should not exceed ten. That way, there was a guaranteed absence of bozos. One of the best additions turned out to be Bill Atkinson, an unofficial defector from the Lisa team. Bill was definitely rock and roll. He had devoted three and a half years of his life into

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of guilds-those with access to Linotype machines and art directors and printing presses-now were accessible with a single point-and-click. To echo Bill Atkinson's words, the fine china was now available for everyday use. The Macintosh Product Introduction Plan, dated August 15, 1982, was a weighty document that

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an adept, second only perhaps to Burrell Smith. Horn would just sit there and scream, top of his lungs. Working at his home one day, Bill Atkinson became so frustrated at the state of the Finder that he yanked the mouse cord from the machine and threw the pointing device at the

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chalk up the faults of their masterpiece to hubris. "In our efforts to change the world we were a little arrogant and unwilling to listen," Bill Atkinson later explained. "There was a feeling that Lisa [with its expensive memory and hard disk drivel got out of hand; we didn't want fat

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-shirts! What really terrified Apple's directors was the alleged gulf between the people who designed Macintosh-people like Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith and Bill Atkinson, who probably didn't even own suits-and the Brooks Brothers data processing managers who fondly remembered punch cards. Just because the latter were people

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time for creativity, for innovation, for vision. And Sculley was determined to be known as the architect of that vision. So, in late 1985, when Bill Atkinson went to John Sculley with an idea that dramatically enhanced the Macintosh's ability to handle information, the chairman and chief executive officer was a

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willing audience. The past few months had been dreary for Bill Atkinson. At first, the inventor of QuickDraw and hero of MacPaint thought he had avoided the post-Macintosh depression paralyzing many of his peers. Capitalizing on

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fact, it seemed to him, the important thing was what one could do. Could you aid your fellow humans, enhance their abilities? Make a contribution? Bill Atkinson realized that, more than most, he could. He was in a position of leadership. He was a world-class thinker, a right-brained adept. And

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company called General Magic. Nestled in the cubicles of the General Magic engineering department is virtually a Mac Hall of Fame. In the corner sits Bill Atkinson, the corporation's chairman. Next to his cubicle is Hertzfeld, the inspiration to the young hackers on staff Also in the room are Susan Kare

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play

by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant · 7 Nov 2019

a story riddled with holes, starting with the obvious: How would Steve Jobs have even thought there was anything to steal in the first place? Bill Atkinson came to Apple in 1978, after Jobs had convinced him to quit his Ph.D. program in neuroscience at UC San Diego. He had become

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that would let children build computer programs as easily as they might build sandcastles.20 The Smalltalk demo was just an hour long, and for Bill Atkinson it was a blur. In fact, the most eventful thing Atkinson saw that day wasn’t the desktop metaphor—the early papers from Xerox PARC

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click wheel, which cracked the problem of making it fun to browse incredibly long lists (which themselves were formatted in the drop-down menus that Bill Atkinson invented for the Lisa). Blackberry, with its telephone lashed to a keyboard, was another empire until the iPhone. Even Amazon grew from an interface idea

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. Those few minutes had to add up. 14. Jane Fulton Suri, “Saving Lives Through Design,” Ergonomics in Design (Summer 2000): 2–10. 15. Interview with Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, May 14, 2018. 16. Interview with Bruce Horn, May 9, 2018. 17. Interview with Atkinson; Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox

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very least, have reason to be wary of telling their stories, given how often those stories have been misconstrued. Among the former I would count Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, whom I was honored to have met. Among the latter I would include Erik Glaser, Brian Lathrop, and the staff at Audi

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made

by Andy Hertzfeld · 19 Nov 2011

still a long way to go before the Macintosh dream is fully realized, and perhaps the best stories are yet to come. Cast of Characters Bill Atkinson Jef Raskin recruited Bill to work for Apple in the spring of 1978. His work on the QuickDraw graphics package was the foundation of both

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their first two products, the Radius Full Page Display and the Radius Accelerator. He retired from the computer industry in 1988. Bud Tribble Bud met Bill Atkinson and Jef Raskin at University of San Diego in the early 1970s. Jef convinced him to take a one-year leave of absence from medical

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to run Pascal. To accomplish this, the language card had to bank switch its RAM over to the ROM on the Apple II motherboard. Bill Atkinson was the main programmer for both the Apple II Pascal system, as well as the new Lisa system. He was in the service department picking

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called into Tom Whitney’s office and promoted to “member of technical staff” as a full-fledged engineer. Steve Jobs, Jerry Manock, Steve Capps, and Bill Atkinson Good Earth October 1980 The original Mac team’s original office In 1979 and 1980, Jef Raskin’s Macintosh project was a four-person research

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Mac, so nothing much happened until Bud Tribble replaced him in September of 1980. Bud knew Jef from UCSD, and was also good friends with Bill Atkinson. They had a part-time, two-person consulting company in Seattle called Synaptic Systems while they were both graduate students. Bill and Jef convinced Bud

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Seattle. Bud was in the fifth year of a seven-year program. Instead of returning to med school, Bud moved into a spare room at Bill Atkinson’s house and started work on the Mac project at Apple. He quickly began to breathe life into Burrell’s languishing prototype by writing some

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feature we called “square dots.” Square dots made it easier to write graphical applications because you didn’t have to worry about the resolution disparity. Bill Atkinson, the author of QuickDraw and the main Lisa graphics programmer, was a strong advocate of square dots, but not everyone on the Lisa team felt

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and software guys, including Rich Page and Paul Baker and software manager Bruce Daniels, over to Texaco Towers for a demo on a Monday afternoon. Bill Atkinson did the talking as we ran various graphics demos, and then Burrell gave a presentation on the Mac design and his ideas for scaling it

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ton of work still to do before launch. We had to write an operating system, hook up peripherals like the keyboard and mouse, and get Bill Atkinson’s graphics and user interface routines, running, for example. But we also sometimes wrote demo programs just for the fun of it. In early March

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I could keep more than 100 balls animating smoothly, which seemed pretty impressive. I also wrote a small sketch program with a seed fill using Bill Atkinson’s 8 × 8 pattern bitmaps, as well as an entertaining Breakout game in which I implemented Bud’s idea of dodging the bricks when they

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ordered three large Pineapple Pizzas (which tasted great). Round Rects Are Everywhere! May 1981 Steve inspires Bill by pointing out something about the real world Bill Atkinson worked mostly at home, but whenever he made significant progress he rushed in to Apple to show it off to anyone who would appreciate it

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place. I wrote a 17-microsecond loop that fit the bill, and we were delighted to see it work perfectly. Apple II mouse card prototype Bill Atkinson had told Steve a decent graphical user interface on the Apple II wasn’t possible because of the weakness of its 6502 processor and the

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prefabricated desktop patterns or edit their own. It was this latter capability that caused problems, as it was pretty easy to create abominably ugly patterns. Bill Atkinson, the creator of MacPaint, complained to me that it was a mistake to allow users to specify their own desktop patterns because it was harder

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68000 assembly language. Even so, we could still use Lisa code by manually translating it from the Pascal into assembly language. We directly incorporated QuickDraw, Bill Atkinson’s amazing bitmapped graphics package, since it was written in assembly language. We also used the Lisa window and menu managers, which we recoded in

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a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code written that week. Bill Atkinson, the author of QuickDraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought lines of code was a

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t enough time left in the schedule for further experimentation, so they were pretty much stuck with it. One afternoon Dan mentioned his dissatisfaction to Bill Atkinson, the main designer of the Lisa User Interface. Bill suggested they meet that evening at his home in Los Gatos for a brainstorming session to

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wasn’t designed all at once; it was actually the result of almost five years of experimentation and development at Apple, starting with graphics routines Bill Atkinson began writing for Lisa in late 1978. Like any evolutionary process, there were many false starts and blind alleys along the way. It’s a

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these tend to be lost to history, since there is a lot we can learn from them. Fortunately, the main developer of the user interface, Bill Atkinson, was an avid, lifelong photographer, and he had the foresight to document the incremental development of the Lisa User Interface (which more or less became

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accomplish something. As usual, Bob Dylan said it best when he wrote in 1965: “He not busy being born, is busy dying.” Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson in January 1984 I Still Remember Regions April 1982 We almost lose Bill in a car accident The single most significant component of the original

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Macintosh technology was QuickDraw, the graphics package written by Bill Atkinson for the Lisa project. QuickDraw pushed pixels around the frame buffer at blinding speeds to create the celebrated user interface. One of QuickDraw’s main

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regions were quite compact. But occasionally there were lots of inversions, like in a circle, so regions grew as necessary. QuickDraw was written entirely by Bill Atkinson, and in the spring of 1982, it was still evolving. He had recently sped up region operations by more than a factor of 4. The

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formulate a shared view of the UI, metaphorically locking ourselves in a room until we came to consensus. The meetings were attended by Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson, Joanna Hoffman, Chris Espinosa, Randy Wigginton (who had left Apple in September 1981, but agreed to write MacWrite for us as a semi-independent

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work we were doing so he could make his great suggestions. Late one afternoon he showed up in the software area, and the team (including Bill Atkinson and Steve Jobs) gathered around to demo new software for him. Bill had done some neat hi-resolution scans with an improved dithering algorithm, and

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Macintosh was a cute little computer, but it was fundamentally limited by the 16 bits of address space on the 6809 microprocessor. In the meantime, Bill Atkinson was doing incredible work on the Lisa project using Motorola’s 68000 microprocessor, with its capacious 32-bit registers and 24-bit address space. Bud

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to enjoy before dinner. I was about to join a group going for a walk on the nearby beach when I was pulled aside by Bill Atkinson. It was obvious that something was bothering him. Even though he was technically a member of the Lisa team, Bill attended the Macintosh retreats.

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prestigious technical position at Apple and had only been awarded to two other employees: Steve Wozniak and Rod Holt. There would now be two more, Bill Atkinson and Rich Page, for their seminal contributions to Lisa. A fringe benefit of being appointed an Apple Fellow was a fresh pile of stock options

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instantly recognizable likeness with a mischievous grin that captured a lot of Steve’s personality. Everyone she showed it to liked it, even Steve himself. Bill Atkinson was so impressed with the Steve icon that he asked Susan to draw one of him so he could use it in the MacPaint About

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be automatically clipped as necessary. It was the ultimate showcase for QuickDraw’s “region clipping” technology. The Macintosh Window Manager was based on a design Bill Atkinson wrote in Pascal for the Lisa; my job was to rewrite it in 68000 assembly language and adapt it to the Macintosh environment. The first

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We’re taking the Apple logo in vain!” busy being born, part 2 Here are a few seminal Macintosh screenshots, à la the Lisa Polaroids Bill Atkinson had the foresight to document the creation of the Lisa User Interface by keeping a Polaroid camera near his computer and taking a snapshot of

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to the Finder in March 1982 After the micro-finder, Bruce also worked on another prototype that included folders in a two-pane view. Meanwhile, Bill Atkinson was crafting an icon-based file manager prototype for Lisa (see “Rosing’s Rascals” on page 74), and we eventually decided to follow that direction

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one of our ROM releases; he also saved and scanned the document for inclusion here. • • • • • • • • • • • • In early 1983, I wrote an icon editor based on Bill Atkinson’s Fat Bits pixel-editing techniques that Susan Kare used to craft most of the early Mac icons. The icon editor displayed both a large

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heard of. They ought to be world class cities!” And that is how Chicago (Elefont), New York, Geneva, London, San Francisco (Ransom), Toronto, and Venice (Bill Atkinson’s script font) got their names. contributed by Susan Kare Pirate Flag August 1983 The Mac Team hoists a pirate flag In January 1983, just

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a mess?” So you can get really good at “cleaning up!” MacPaint Evolution June 1983 Bill decides to leave out a very impressive feature While Bill Atkinson was developing LisaGraf, the crucial, lightning-fast graphics package that was the foundation of both the Lisa and Macintosh user interface (it was renamed QuickDraw

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5,804 lines of Pascal code, augmented by another 2,738 lines of assembly language, which compiled into less than .05 megabytes of executable code. Bill Atkinson in 1987 part four He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law

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fashion, we were all graduates of Steve Wozniak University. The official Macintosh design team. Left to right: George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and Jerry Manock. The Mythical Man-Year October 1983 Steve estimates the effort that went into QuickDraw In October of 1983, we had our first

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taken to develop. “How many man-years did it take to write QuickDraw?” the reporter asked Steve. QuickDraw, the amazing graphics package written entirely by Bill Atkinson, was at the heart of both Lisa and Macintosh. Steve turned to look at Bill. “Bill, how long did you spend writing QuickDraw?” “Well,

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couldn’t run for more than 20 minutes. At that point, even if it didn’t crash, the Monkey would invariably select the Quit command. Bill Atkinson came up with the idea of defining a system flag called “MonkeyLives” (pronounced with a short “i” but often mispronounced with a long one).

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we wanted to build; after all, just the frame buffer for the bitmap display took up almost one third of the available memory. And furthermore, Bill Atkinson’s graphics routines had recently exceeded the size of the 8K ROM. So, when the digital board was redesigned to incorporate the SCC chip in

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with a simple way of compressing the four or five icons that were built into the ROM, saving hundreds of precious bytes in the process. Bill Atkinson didn’t participate in the marathon code-crunching and, except in a few cases, wouldn’t allow QuickDraw to be subjected to it. He believed

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And Loving It.” Burrell at home in March 1985. MacPaint Gallery October 1983 A gallery of Susan Kare’s MacPaint art from 1983 Susan Kare Bill Atkinson began writing MacPaint in February 1983, just after Susan Kare joined the Mac team to design bitmaps for fonts and icons. Susan became one of

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cycles that were only a few hours apart, re-releasing every time we fixed a significant problem. Top: Rony Sebok, Susan Kare. Middle: Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Owen Densmore. Bottom: Jerome Coonen, Bruce Horn, Steve Capps, Larry Kenyon. Front: Donn Denman, Tracy Kenyon, Patti Kenyon. When a new release was ready,

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I knew a much better algorithm for grayscale rendering that would be fun to try out in practice. Thunderscan in action. My friend and colleague Bill Atkinson was a talented photographer, and one of his hobbies was experimenting to find the best algorithms for rendering digitized pictures. Bill loved to explain his

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for a wild ride on his motorcycle and crashed it, returning home scraped up but with no real damage, except to his already battered ego. Bill Atkinson was outraged that Apple could treat Donn and his users so callously, and let John Sculley know how he felt. But the deal was done

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but it was a poor choice in the long run because it made it harder to control the software base as the system evolved. Even Bill Atkinson made an occasional error. His worst mistake was using signed 16-bit integers as sizes in various QuickDraw data structures like regions and pictures. This

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long after Jef left the company. He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then hiring amazing individuals like Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman, and Brian Howard for the Macintosh team. But there is

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much reason to correlate it with Raskin’s ideas at all. So, if not Jef, does anyone else qualify as a parent of the Macintosh? Bill Atkinson is a strong candidate, since he was almost single-handedly responsible for the breakthrough user interface, graphics software, and killer application (MacPaint) that distinguished the

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Rose, Paul Tavenier, and Tom Zito for contributing stories to the Folklore.org web site, where this book originated. Thanks to original Mac team members Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Jerome Coonen, George Crow, Donn Denman, Joanna Hoffman, Bruce Horn, Brian Howard, Steve Jobs, Susan Kare, Larry and Patti Kenyon, Scott Knaster,

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his car. © D.W. Mellor 83: Crowd at US Festival. © Bettmann/CORBIS 85: Steve Wozniak playing air computer. © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS 99: Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson. © Norman Seeff 104, 107: Alice packaging. Photos courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 128: Mike Moritz. © Matthew Naythons 150: Steve Jobs, John Sculley, and Steve

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Wozniak. © Bettmann/CORBIS 169: Defender® screenshot. Used with permission of Midway Games, Inc. 175: Bill Atkinson in 1987. Photo courtesy of Bill Atkinson 178: The Mac design team. © Norman Seef. Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 180, 182, 183: 1984 commercial stills. © Apple Computer, Inc

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson · 23 Oct 2011 · 915pp · 232,883 words

AL ALCORN. Chief engineer at Atari, who designed Pong and hired Jobs. GIL AMELIO. Became CEO of Apple in 1996, bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back. BILL ATKINSON. Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Macintosh. CHRISANN BRENNAN. Jobs’s girlfriend at Homestead High, mother of his daughter Lisa. LISA BRENNAN-JOBS. Daughter

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to grow impatient with how boring it was turning out to be. There was, however, one programmer who was infusing the project with some life: Bill Atkinson. He was a doctoral student in neuroscience who had experimented with his fair share of acid. When he was asked to come work for Apple

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small skunkworks project for a low-cost machine that was being developed by a colorful employee named Jef Raskin, a former professor who had taught Bill Atkinson. Raskin’s goal was to make an inexpensive “computer for the masses” that would be like an appliance—a self-contained unit with computer, keyboard

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he called Xerox headquarters demanding more. So he was invited back a few days later, and this time he brought a larger team that included Bill Atkinson and Bruce Horn, an Apple programmer who had worked at Xerox PARC. They both knew what to look for. “When I arrived at work, there

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. “I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.” When the Xerox PARC meeting ended after more than two hours, Jobs drove Bill Atkinson back to the Apple office in Cupertino. He was speeding, and so were his mind and mouth. “This is it!” he shouted, emphasizing each word

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icons. An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There’s a reason why humans invented phonetic languages.” Raskin’s former student Bill Atkinson sided with Jobs. They both wanted a powerful processor that could support whizzier graphics and the use of a mouse. “Steve had to take the

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THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD Playing by His Own Set of Rules The original Mac team in 1984: George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and Jerry Manock When Andy Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team, he got a briefing from Bud Tribble, the other software designer, about the huge amount

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a meeting—without even considering the truth. It came from willfully defying reality, not only to others but to himself. “He can deceive himself,” said Bill Atkinson. “It allowed him to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and internalized it.” A lot of people distort reality, of

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’s worldview was his binary way of categorizing things. People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either “the best” or “totally shitty.” Bill Atkinson, the Mac designer who fell on the good side of these dichotomies, described what it was like: It was difficult working under Steve, because there

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a Ferrari, that’s not right either,” Jobs countered. “It should be more like a Porsche!” Jobs owned a Porsche 928 at the time. When Bill Atkinson was over one weekend, Jobs brought him outside to admire the car. “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes,” he told Atkinson

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computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.” Jobs obsessed with equal intensity about the look of what would appear on the screen. One day Bill Atkinson burst into Texaco Towers all excited. He had just come up with a brilliant algorithm that could draw circles and ovals onscreen quickly. The math

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graphic displays, the audience quieted for a moment. A few gasps could be heard. And then, in rapid succession, came a series of screen shots: Bill Atkinson’s QuickDraw graphics package followed by displays of different fonts, documents, charts, drawings, a chess game, a spreadsheet, and a rendering of Steve Jobs with

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a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then

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or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley.” Bill Atkinson, who had worked on both teams, thought it was not only callous, but unfair. “These people had worked really hard and were brilliant engineers,” he

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be later to win. . . .” A rescue squad from his former Macintosh posse arrived to dispel the gloom on Sunday night, led by Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. Jobs took a while to answer their knock, and then he led them to a room next to the kitchen that was one of the

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.0, Apple sued. Sculley contended that the 1985 deal did not apply to Windows 2.0 and that further refinements to Windows (such as copying Bill Atkinson’s trick of “clipping” overlapping windows) had made the infringement more blatant. By 1997 Apple had lost the case and various appeals, but remnants of

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at the University of Michigan. He had gone to work at the handheld device maker General Magic (where he met Apple refugees Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson), and then spent some awkward time at Philips Electronics, where he bucked the staid culture with his short bleached hair and rebellious style. He had

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ear, so that your lobes didn’t accidentally activate some function. And of course the icons came in his favorite shape, the primitive he made Bill Atkinson design into the software of the first Macintosh: rounded rectangles. In session after session, with Jobs immersed in every detail, the team members figured out

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fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.” For the unveiling at the January 2007 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs invited back Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, and the 1984 Macintosh team, as he had done when he launched the iMac. In a career of dazzling product presentations, this may

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industry and save the spines of spavined students bearing backpacks by creating electronic texts and curriculum material for the iPad. He was also working with Bill Atkinson, his friend from the original Macintosh team, on devising new digital technologies that worked at the pixel level to allow people to take great photographs

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my wife, Cathy, for her editing, suggestions, wise counsel, and so very much more. SOURCES Interviews (conducted 2009–2011) Al Alcorn, Roger Ames, Fred Anderson, Bill Atkinson, Joan Baez, Marjorie Powell Barden, Jeff Bewkes, Bono, Ann Bowers, Stewart Brand, Chrisann Brennan, Larry Brilliant, John Seeley Brown, Tim Brown, Nolan Bushnell, Greg Calhoun

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Rich,” Time, Feb. 15, 1982. CHAPTER 8: XEROX AND LISA A New Baby: Interviews with Andrea Cunningham, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson. Wozniak, 226; Levy, Insanely Great, 124; Young, 168–170; Bill Atkinson, oral history, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA; Jef Raskin, “Holes in the Histories,” Interactions, July 1994; Jef Raskin, “Hubris

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13, 2000, Stanford Library Department of Special Collections; Linzmayer, 74, 85–89. Xerox PARC: Interviews with Steve Jobs, John Seeley Brown, Adele Goldberg, Larry Tesler, Bill Atkinson. Freiberger and Swaine, 239; Levy, Insanely Great, 66–80; Hiltzik, 330–341; Linzmayer, 74–75; Young, 170–172; Rose, 45–47; Triumph of the Nerds

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, PBS, part 3. “Great Artists Steal”: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Larry Tesler, Bill Atkinson. Levy, Insanely Great, 77, 87–90; Triumph of the Nerds, PBS, part 3; Bruce Horn, “Where It All Began” (1966), www.mackido.com; Hiltzik, 343

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, 1982; “The Seeds of Success,” Time, Feb. 15, 1982; Moritz, 292–295; Sheff. CHAPTER 10: THE MAC IS BORN Jef Raskin’s Baby: Interviews with Bill Atkinson, Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Markkula. Jef Raskin, “Recollections of the Macintosh Project,” “Holes in the Histories,” “The Genesis and History of the Macintosh Project

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Cunningham, Bruce Horn, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Scott, Mike Markkula. Hertzfeld, 19–20, 26–27; Wozniak, 241–242. CHAPTER 11: THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD Interviews with Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Debi Coleman, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Joanna Hoffman, Al Eisenstat, Ann Bowers, Steve Jobs. Some of these tales have variations. See Hertzfeld, 24

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, 1983. (The design conference audiotapes are stored at the Aspen Institute. I want to thank Deborah Murphy for finding them.) Like a Porsche: Interviews with Bill Atkinson, Alain Rossmann, Mike Markkula, Steve Jobs. “The Macintosh Design Team,” Byte, Feb. 1984; Hertzfeld, 29–31, 41, 46, 63, 68; Sculley, 157; Jerry Manock, “Invasion

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Big Time,” Fortune, Feb. 7, 1983; “The Year of the Mouse,” Time, Jan. 31, 1983. Let’s Be Pirates! Interviews with Ann Bowers, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Arthur Rock, Mike Markkula, Steve Jobs, Debi Coleman; email from Susan Kare. Hertzfeld, 76, 135–138, 158, 160, 166; Moritz, 21–28; Young, 295–297

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Compatibility Grows,” Washington Post, Nov. 29, 1983; Triumph of the Nerds, PBS, part 3. CHAPTER 17: ICARUS Flying High: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Debi Coleman, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Alain Rossmann, Joanna Hoffman, Jean-Louis Gassée, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur Rock, John Sculley. Sheff; Hertzfeld, 206–207, 230; Sculley, 197–199; Young, 308

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words

them a little bit more. So we did. Bruce Horn: Atkinson was just looking at it so closely—trying to figure it out. Andy Hertzfeld: Bill Atkinson was the main graphics engineer at Apple, and he was doing the graphics on the Lisa. Bruce Horn: He was nose to the screen, just

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a mouse into! So we were a little puzzled as to what this thing really was going to do. Trip Hawkins: We gave it to Bill Atkinson, and he wrote a driver that did stuff graphically. And until that happened, there had been this debate where the mouse was a real bone

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Woz had done with the Apple II. Dan Kottke: The graphical interface with the mouse and windows? That was pretty much taken from Xerox PARC. Bill Atkinson: We tried a lot of things, we didn’t just take what Xerox had done. In fact, many of the things that we did, they

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space so that it’s close to the door—and he plops it into his trunk and goes, “We’re going to the Mac building.” Bill Atkinson: We had a place that was behind the Good Earth Restaurant. And so they called it Salt of the Earth. Dan Kottke: Burrell Smith had

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the time it was cataclysmic in its consequences. The battles that were fought to push this point of view out the door were very large. Bill Atkinson: I remember an interesting incident on the icons for the Lisa. We needed a way to show whether there was something in the trash: if

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Mac was going to be a computer you would take to bed with you, like you would sit on your bed to do your work. Bill Atkinson: When the Mac was designed, we had a pretty clear picture of a fourteen-year-old boy using this thing, and we knew what they

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such a huge disconnect between us and our board, who were then on from our own point of view just a big bunch of schmucks. Bill Atkinson: Apple management didn’t want it to air. They ordered Steve to sell the time back. Lee Clow: So we sold off all the time

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coming… Oh my God, that was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen! An incredible piece of science fiction! Ridley Scott: We nailed it. Bill Atkinson: It won a Cleo. Mike Murray: The following night on ABC, CBS, and NBC—those were the three networks then—it was shown as news

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next board meeting, three weeks later, they summon the Mac senior team and when we all go into the boardroom they stand up and clap. Bill Atkinson: And so, one of the biggest differences when the Mac finally shipped is it was the first computer that people really fell in love with

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power came back and there was all this excitement again. Fabrice Florin: I remember having basically a lot of interesting conversations, including the one with Bill Atkinson. Bill was one of the designers of the Macintosh. He had an idea at the time which he hadn’t coded yet, but he was

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and Doug Engelbart had been talking about for decades before. We all sit on the shoulders of giants. We’re all inspired by these ideas. Bill Atkinson: I viewed what was later called HyperCard as being a software erector set—where you could plug together prefab pieces and make your own software

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have a pointing device, linking is a natural piece. You can click on this, click on that. Fundamentally the mouse and linking are the same. Bill Atkinson: Looking back, I sort of see that HyperCard was kind of like the first glimmer of a web browser—but chained to a hard drive

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color. Larry Tesler: One of the things that grew out of it was the Apple Fellows Program. The first three Apple Fellows were Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, and Rich Page. The initial definition of a fellow was someone who had made a big impact on the industry. Al Alcorn was recruited—he

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and it even included a person who was not an engineer—Kristina Hooper Woolsey. Kristina Woolsey: I came in ’85 when the HyperCard stuff started. Bill Atkinson spontaneously decided to do the product. He and a small team just popped this thing out. Al Alcorn: HyperCard was developed by Bill and two

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springboard the project and get it funded. Al Alcorn: So Marc was pushing this thing, and he infected Bill Atkinson and some of the other guys with this idea. Andy Hertzfeld: Marc met with Bill Atkinson, who had just finished HyperCard and was kind of looking around for what to do next. And he

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are just geniuses. I didn’t care if they called it General Pickle. I was going to work side by side with Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson; what else could anyone ever dream for, right? I think I was employee number thirteen. Michael Stern: Andy and Bill were the gods of the

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of the day—which Anuff did with untrammeled glee. The sarcasm and snark that fills the web today is, essentially, Anuff’s personality writ large. Bill Atkinson was the software wizard responsible for the Macintosh’s breakthrough look and feel. His program, HyperCard, was the first really successful example of hyperlinked “hypermedia

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from Dean Hovey, Jim Sachs, and Jim Yurchenco come from Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s “Making the Macintosh” history project for the Stanford University Library. Bill Atkinson’s quotes here and in other chapters are from Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions, 2007. Hello, I’m Macintosh Steve Jobs’s “shithead” quote can

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Florida Business Journal. What Information Wants Ted Nelson’s quote is in Michael Schrage’s November 1984 Washington Post story on the first Hackers Conference. Bill Atkinson’s quotes are from an August 2012 Berkeley Cybersalon event on the creation and legacy of Hypercard. Doug Carlson’s, Robert Woodhead’s, and Steve

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

by Andrew Lih · 5 Jul 2010 · 398pp · 86,023 words

around on the screen. You could also put virtual buttons on cards that could respond to clicks and other commands. The brainchild of Apple programmer Bill Atkinson, HyperCard was originally given away for free in 1987 and became incredibly popular with seasoned computer programmers, novice users, and educational institutions. It was easy

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displays getting bigger and bigger. HyperCard was also an odd product for Apple to manage. Because it was given away, something Apple’s esteemed creator Bill Atkinson demanded, the company made no direct revenue from it. So while it became quite popular, it was hard for Apple, primarily a computer hardware company

Dealers of Lightning

by Michael A. Hiltzik · 27 Apr 2000 · 559pp · 157,112 words

thirty times and see something new every time.” What was interesting—or to Goldberg, ominous—was the intensity with which the Apple engineers paid attention. Bill Atkinson, a brilliant programmer who would later put his distinctive stamp on the Macintosh, kept his eyes on the screen as though they were fixed there

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move an arrow on the screens, then executed the command by striking “enter.” The mouse was available, but it was scantily used and entirely optional. Bill Atkinson, whose intense concentration during the demo left such a strong impression on Tesler, had spent months trying to design a more dynamic interface. But he

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System

by Chet Haase · 12 Aug 2021 · 580pp · 125,129 words

you’ve met elsewhere. 253 Cary agreed that he implemented Picture for Skia, but not that he invented the concept. He gave that credit to Bill Atkinson, one of the engineers on the original Macintosh team at Apple who helped create the original QuickDraw 2D graphics engine for the Mac

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. “Bill Atkinson invented Pictures, and he probably stole it from somebody else. I was just standing on the shoulders of giants.” Most software that is written is

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

by Scott Rosenberg · 2 Jan 2006 · 394pp · 118,929 words

program, its quality, or its ultimate value to a user. Andy Hertzfeld tells a relevant tale from the early days at Apple about his mentor Bill Atkinson, a legendary software innovator who created Quickdraw and Hypercard. Atkinson was responsible for the graphic interface of Apple’s Lisa computer (a predecessor of the

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group average here to come out right.” “I try to play all the chess moves in my head before I start,” Anderson answers. Hertzfeld laughs. “Bill Atkinson used to say about me, everything was ‘Ready, fire, aim!’” “I’ve typically done most of a project by myself,” Anderson says. “I haven’t

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/000248.htm. “Management is about human beings”: Peter Drucker, “Management as Social Function and Liberal Art,” in The Essential Drucker (Harper Business, 2001), p. 10. Bill Atkinson’s “-2000” lines of code: From Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (O’Reilly, 2005