Originally published at: Bill Atkinson Dies from Pancreatic Cancer at 74 - TidBITS
Late last year, Bill Atkinson shared news of his health with the world (see “Bill Atkinson Diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer,” 14 November 2024). Unfortunately, pancreatic cancer is particularly deadly—in our sphere, it has also claimed Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin (who started the Macintosh project and lured Bill Atkinson to Apple), and my friend Oliver Habicht.
Bill’s family posted this message on his 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.
The impact of Bill’s contributions is immeasurable. Although he worked alongside other early members of the Lisa and Macintosh teams, everything I find suggests that he wrote the Mac’s QuickDraw graphics engine and the initial versions of MacPaint and HyperCard almost single-handedly. It’s almost incomprehensible that one person could have created so much of such import in a relatively short span of time. A great Steve Jobs story on Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore site gives a sense of just how insanely creative and productive Bill was, and I encourage you to search for Bill’s name on Folklore to read more about his accomplishments.
While I was never enough of a graphics person to get much from MacPaint, it introduced the bitmap editing paradigm to the mass market and heavily influenced Adobe Photoshop. HyperCard, on the other hand, changed my life. It was the reason TidBITS came into being (see “TidBITS History,” 18 April 1994), and part of the impetus for Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the World Wide Web stemmed from a desire to provide distributed, cross-machine linking and multi-user access in a hypertext system—capabilities that HyperCard lacked.
I’ll always remember Bill fondly for the several hours of conversation we shared at Macworld Expo (see “Macworld Expo 2010 Reboots,” 15 February 2010), and I wish him the best on whatever new level of consciousness he has achieved.
