Re: Bill Atkinson, rest in peace

From the «mortal genius» department:
Title: Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74
Author: John Gruber
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2025 20:36:31 +0000
Link: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10238073579963378&id=1378467145&_rdr
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From his family, on Atkinson’s Facebook page:
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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.
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One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history. If you
want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org site and
(re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here’s just one, with Steve Jobs
inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect[1]. Here’s another (surely near and
dear to my friend Brent Simmons’s heart[2]) with this kicker of a closing line[3]
: “I’m not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a
couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly
complied.”
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Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever
devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson
might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the
extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware. Atkinson’s genius
dithering algorithm[4] was my inspiration for the name of Dithering[5], my
podcast with Ben Thompson. I find that effect beautiful and love that it
continues to prove useful, like on the Playdate[6] and apps like BitCam[7].
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In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw, Atkinson was also
the creator of MacPaint[8] (which to this day stands as the model for bitmap
image editors — Photoshop, I would argue, was conceptually derived directly
from MacPaint) and HyperCard[9] (“inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in
1985[10]”), the influence of which cannot be overstated.
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I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best
computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he’s on the short list.
What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.
★ [11]
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Links:
[1]: https://folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html (link)
[2]: https://inessential.com/2002/06/25/deleting_code.html (link)
[3]: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html (link)
[4]: https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+atkinson+dithering+algorithm (link)
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_dithering (link)
[6]: https://play.date/ (link)
[7]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/06/10/bitcam (link)
[8]: https://www.folklore.org/MacPaint_Evolution.html (link)
[9]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/06/17/hypercard (link)
[10]: https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html (link)
[11]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/bill-atkinson-rip (link)