This is an interesting view of this seminal work.
3 Likes
I note that we haven’t marked the passing of Bill Atkinson, or celebrated his work more generally, so (with permission) here are a couple of links I have:
On folklore.org, which is all about Macintosh history, Bill writes about Joining Apple Computer:
The Apple II displayed white text on a black background. I argued that to do graphics properly we had to switch to a white background like paper. It works fine to invert text when printing, but it would not work for a photo to be printed in negative. The Lisa hardware team complained the screen would flicker too much, and they would need faster refresh with more expensive RAM to prevent smearing when scrolling. Steve listened to all the pros and cons then sided with a white background for the sake of graphics.
Neaby, Andy Hertzfeld writes I Still Remember Regions:
The single most significant component of the original Macintosh technology was QuickDraw, the graphics package written by Bill Atkinson for the Lisa project, which pushed pixels around the frame buffer at blinding speeds to create the celebrated user interface.
And here’s a short video of a panel presentation in which - to great audience reaction - Bill Atkinson shows off the features of MacPaint and MacWrite
In the HN discussion responding to the news of Bill’s death, there are mentions of Hypercard, and much else. Here are some words from Alan Kay:
Dan Winkler and Bill Atkinson violated a lot of important principles of “good programming language design”, but they achieved the first overall system in which end-users “could see their own faces”, and could do many projects, and learn as they went.
For many reasons, a second pass at the end-user programming problem — that takes advantage of what was learned from Hypercard and Hypertalk — has never been done (AFAIK).
2 Likes