Remembering Bill Atkinson

Jason Snell at Six Colors, Bill Atkinson dies at 74:

Bill Atkinson, who was instrumental in creating the Mac, has died, according to his personal Facebook page:

We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by family. We will miss him greatly, and he will be missed by many of you, too. He was a remarkable person, and the world will be forever different because he lived in it. He was fascinated by consciousness, and as he has passed on to a different level of consciousness, we wish him a journey as meaningful as the one it has been to have him in our lives. He is survived by his wife, two daughters, stepson, stepdaughter, two brothers, four sisters, and dog, Poppy

Bill Atkinson joined Apple in 1979, and was on the Lisa team before being poached by Steve Jobs to the Macintosh team. He was instrumental into making the Macintosh draw fast.

Multiple stories on Folklore.org relate his contributions, like rounded rectangles, or when bean counters tried to track progress in number of lines of code written and he reported -2000. Atkinson also devised a dithering algorithm to display grayscale images into one-bit, and wrote MacPaint that shipped with every new Mac. And probably a lot of other things.

After the Mac was out, he created HyperCard¹, and at his insistance Apple provided it free of charge with every new Mac. It was a smashing success until Apple decided to stop bundling it.

After Apple, he joined General Magic, that, while developing ground breaking technology, didn’t lead directly to any sucessful product.

In his later years he was dedicating his time to photography.

Without him the Macintosh would have been different, and everything that got influenced by it.