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For anyone (like me) wondering who this guy was, he was a prominent UI guy at Apple back in the day. According to Wikipedia he created the menu bar, QuickDraw,

by bigstrat2003 1y ago

For anyone (like me) wondering who this guy was, he was a prominent UI guy at Apple back in the day. According to Wikipedia he created the menu bar, QuickDraw, and HyperCard. For whomever submits stories like this, please say who the person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I've heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.

djmips 1y ago
He was more then a prominent UI guy - back then he was designer and programmer - designing and coding the foundations.
gdubs 1y ago
Adding a bit more context: The World Wide Web arguably exists because of HyperCard. The idea that information can be hyperlinked together. Atkinson was a brilliant engineer. As critical to the launch of A Macintosh as anyone — efficient rendering of regions, overlapping windows, etc. And last but not least, Mac Paint. Every computer painting program in existence owes Atkinson a nod.
- btilly 1y ago
  The idea that information can be hyperlinked together predated HyperCard by decades. It goes back to https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m..., which was written in 1945. The same essay also has the fundamental ideas for a citation index. This gave rise both to the Science Citation Index and to various hypertext systems. For example the famous 1968 presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY, now known as "The Mother of All Demos", demonstrated a working hypertext system among the other jaw-dropping accomplishments. HyperCard brought hypertext to commodity hardware. The Web made a distributed hypertext system viable. Google's PageRank recombined hypertext and the Science Citation Index to make the web more usable. And all of the key insights trace back to Vannevar Bush. Who was able to have such deep insights in 1945 because he had been working in, and thinking about, computing at least since 1927. The history of important ideas in computing generally goes far deeper than most programmers are aware.
  - gdubs 1y ago
    I'm not claiming the idea didn't exist but Atkinson's HyperCard turned it into a viable product and the creators of the web credited him for their inspiration.
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      It's not just the links, more importantly it had: on mouseDown answer "HyperTalk!" with "OK" end mouseDown
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- deleted 1y ago
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- jcynix 1y ago
  > The idea that information can be hyperlinked together. HyperCard was really cool and I miss it. Its most important feature IMO was to enable non-programmers to rather easily author useful software. As happend with Excel. The idea that information can be hyperlinked is much older than HyperCard. Check out Ted Nelson and his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu which predates HyperCard by more than a decade. And then there was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics_Document_Examiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics_Document_Examiner, or GNU Texinfo and its precursors besides many other attempts.
  - gdubs 1y ago
    I'm pretty obsessed with these 'branches not taken' concepts in computing. Like, everything is the same today. And there's good usability arguments that things shouldn't be different for the sake of being different. But, there are so many forgotten concepts of the past that were arguably much more powerful, simple, expressive ways to interact with machines.
zahlman 1y ago
Several previous top-level comments address Atkinson's accomplishments, but I agree with you in principle.
deleted 1y ago
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justin66 1y ago
People are showing you respect when they credit you with the ability to Google things yourself.
deleted 1y ago
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pmoriarty 1y ago
The NYT credits him with inventing the double click.[1] [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-...
- jcynix 1y ago
  Maybe the NYT should check Wikipedia first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-click

djmips 1y ago

He was more then a prominent UI guy - back then he was designer and programmer - designing and coding the foundations.

gdubs 1y ago

Adding a bit more context: The World Wide Web arguably exists because of HyperCard. The idea that information can be hyperlinked together. Atkinson was a brilliant engineer. As critical to the launch of A Macintosh as anyone — efficient rendering of regions, overlapping windows, etc. And last but not least, Mac Paint. Every computer painting program in existence owes Atkinson a nod.

btilly 1y ago
The idea that information can be hyperlinked together predated HyperCard by decades. It goes back to https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m..., which was written in 1945. The same essay also has the fundamental ideas for a citation index. This gave rise both to the Science Citation Index and to various hypertext systems. For example the famous 1968 presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY, now known as "The Mother of All Demos", demonstrated a working hypertext system among the other jaw-dropping accomplishments. HyperCard brought hypertext to commodity hardware. The Web made a distributed hypertext system viable. Google's PageRank recombined hypertext and the Science Citation Index to make the web more usable. And all of the key insights trace back to Vannevar Bush. Who was able to have such deep insights in 1945 because he had been working in, and thinking about, computing at least since 1927. The history of important ideas in computing generally goes far deeper than most programmers are aware.
- gdubs 1y ago
  I'm not claiming the idea didn't exist but Atkinson's HyperCard turned it into a viable product and the creators of the web credited him for their inspiration.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    It's not just the links, more importantly it had: on mouseDown answer "HyperTalk!" with "OK" end mouseDown
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jcynix 1y ago
> The idea that information can be hyperlinked together. HyperCard was really cool and I miss it. Its most important feature IMO was to enable non-programmers to rather easily author useful software. As happend with Excel. The idea that information can be hyperlinked is much older than HyperCard. Check out Ted Nelson and his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu which predates HyperCard by more than a decade. And then there was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics_Document_Examiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics_Document_Examiner, or GNU Texinfo and its precursors besides many other attempts.
- gdubs 1y ago
  I'm pretty obsessed with these 'branches not taken' concepts in computing. Like, everything is the same today. And there's good usability arguments that things shouldn't be different for the sake of being different. But, there are so many forgotten concepts of the past that were arguably much more powerful, simple, expressive ways to interact with machines.

zahlman 1y ago

Several previous top-level comments address Atkinson's accomplishments, but I agree with you in principle.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

justin66 1y ago

People are showing you respect when they credit you with the ability to Google things yourself.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

pmoriarty 1y ago

The NYT credits him with inventing the double click.[1] [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-...

jcynix 1y ago
Maybe the NYT should check Wikipedia first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-click