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From: Jason H <jason_hindle@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Bill Atkinson, rest in peace
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2025 16:42:48 -0000 (UTC)
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On 08/06/2025 04:21, Retrograde wrote:
>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
>
>From his family, on Atkinson’s 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.
>
>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.”
>
>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].
>
>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.
>
>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]
>
>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)

Obituary in this week's Observer.

https://observer.co.uk/news/columnists/article/so-long-bill-atkinson-and-thanks-for-my-apple-epiphany

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A PICKER OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES