Got my first Macintosh in '85 & when I first zonked out on hypercard, I thought it was the ‘internet’…even back in those daze I thought of you as a personal friend bill…you got my prayers for sure.
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This saddens me beyond what I can express. Bill, along with Andy & Jef were all heroes of mine. Those were a big part of the really heady days of the fruit, it’s been downhill ever since then. Hypercard was perhaps the most brilliant software idea ever. I almost literally cried when they murdered it. Never met Bill but always considered him a kind of friend… be well Bill, you are in my thoughts.
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Great to read these memories here. Bill was certainly the embodiment of the artistic origins of the Mac and the community around it. The initial visionaries who saw the potential for new creative forms to emerge.
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HyperCard isn’t dead; it’s still going as Edinburgh-based LiveCode, though thanks to pandemic economics they had to sunset their wonderful free version three years ago.
This is heartbreaking. Bill is a true innovator, and HyperCard is probably the greatest piece of software ever created.
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True innovation takes many, many paths. One of those was the work of a magnificent teacher and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Burton D. “Bud” Rose, who realized the unique ability of HyperText to organize mountains of changing medical information for ordinary medical practitioners. Thus was born “UpToDate in Nephrology” in Bud’s office, in probably the late 1980s (I don’t remember the actual date). Bud convinced some of his academic colleagues to help him leverage HyperCard into a repository of published advances in Kidney Disease care. Because of my addiction to the Mac, I was fortunate to become one of Bud’s early beta testers. Bud’s wife would mail manila envelopes containing sometimes dozens of 3.5" rigid floppies" to us 3 times per year, primarily just for proofreading. Once the internet and browsers transformed information distribution, UpToDate became THE go-to repository of medical information at one’s fingertips. Some VERY smart people have suggested that Bud’s idea was so transformational in the propagation and access to medical information in critical care that Bud should have received the Nobel Prize in Medicine (on the other hand, I have a dear friend whose career was in academic library sciences who “blames” UpToDate for the death of the community hospital medical library. My own view of that is that most innovations have their time in the sun and get replaced by others. Today, one would be hard pressed to find a decent hospital that does NOT provide instantaneous access to UpToDate on all its medical care workstations.
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That is so spot-on.
To getter an even better grasp of how extensive Atkinson’s contributions were at Apple, you can find some great reads on the website of the Computer History museum.
The first one includes video from a panel discussion on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Mac:
This background on the Lisa’s genesis story prominently features Atkinson, as well:
The Lisa: Apple’s Most Influential Failure
And if you want to see how the “sausauge was made” back then, the CHM has released the actual source code of MacPaint and QuickDraw, both of which Atkinson also developed:
MacPaint And QuickDraw Source Code
May he recover fully and be well again soon.
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Hear, hear.
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Wow. I hadn’t read any Pascal in many years. That brings back memories.
I guess in a way, I owe the second half of my career to Bill Atkinson. After bumping along as an independent Mac consultant for a number of years, I got married, started a family, and realised it was time for a “real job.” At the time I was the moderator of the HyperCard forum on CompuServe. One of the frequent members of that forum one day sent me a private email asking whether I’d have any interest in doing HyperCard work for the major electric utility in southern California. They hired me, that job led to another with a major bank headquartered nearby, and 20 years later I had raised a family and retired comfortably. But the initial break was HyperCard, and my familiarity with it. Thanks, Bill!
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Hello Jeff, I remember that Compuserve forum - it was a great place to learn!
We all owe a debt to Bill’s genius. My own businesses were built on the Mac and the LaserWriter - they gave me an edge.
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My thoughts are with Bill. I have his magnificent book of mineral photography ‘Within the Stone’. And he was kind enough to personally respond to a query I had about Photocard. I must have been one of the last people to send some! And thinking of Hypercard do we remember Brian Thomas’s If Monks had Macs? There is an emulation up at If Monks Had Macs : Brian Thomas : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive But it doesn’t load in Safari on Sequoia 15.1.1 Does anyone know of another in-browser emulation?
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According to his Facebook page, today is his second wedding anniversary. He married Jingwen Cai on January 7, 2023.
Damn, this makes me really sad. Bil was one of my heroes from those early, heady days of Macintosh. He and Andy Hertzfeld and a host of others.
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Oh man, I’ve had the OS X version on my Mac for the longest time, but, alas, never really took the time to explore it. It’s a PowerPC application, and I don’t have a machine with that processor “handy,” so…
I did, however, get the version behind the link you posted to work in the most recent version Firefox running on an M2 Mac. Very neat!
Thanks for reminding us of that wonderful stack, @steve17!
I also found it works on my MBPro M1 running Sequoia 15.2 in the Firefox browser. Though it is very kludgy.
Apropos history this is a fascinating interview with Brenda Laurel - her book Computers as Theatre was required reading on my MA in Interactive Multimedia Production in 1996. She worked on Atari games as a researcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru-ev3zhhus
The same guy then interviews Bob Stein who worked with Brenda and HCI (Human Computer Interaction) pioneer Alan Kay at Atari. Bob Stein went on to co-found The Criterion Collection and later the Voyager Company. Voyager published the first CD-ROMs including If Monks had Macs. He mentions the first thing Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was kill Hypercard. He worked on an interactive version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica at Atari which was owned by Warners who didn’t know what to do with the platform. He is now working on an interactive interface for the Internet Archive. This was inspired by Muriel Cooper’s groundbreaking work on 3D interfaces for computer navigation while she was at MIT with Alan Kay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No7MyFafWqU