Re: RIP, Bill Atkinson: A giant of computing has left us

Atkinson is known for, among other things, the “QuickDraw” graphics
engine, which was at the core of how those early Macintoshes could
manage graphics drawing at interactive speeds, on a processor running
at a nominal 8MHz clock speed, with no hardware acceleration.

He also created the MacPaint application, to show off the artistic
capabilities of the Macintosh -- and its ease of use. There is a video
somewhere of Atkinson’s 2-year-old daughter using MacPaint, her tiny
fist barely big enough to cover the mouse, otherwise being quite
comfortable figuring out the drawing tools.

And later, he created HyperCard, which was one of those forays into
“end-user programming” which was perhaps more successful than most.

Atkinson is named on Apple’s patent for the “region” structure, which
was a compact way of representing arbitrary regions of pixels, which
might have holes in them or even consist of entirely disjoint pieces.
These structures were heavily used in QuickDraw for clipping graphics
drawing (particularly for dealing with overlapping windows), though they
could be rendered as graphics objects in their own right.

Apple’s patent meant that nobody else could use that structure. For
example, X11 had to use a less efficient way of representing pixel
regions. The patent did finally expire around 2004, I think it was.