In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not just programmers) the "bicycle for the mind" that Steve Jobs spoke of. I think this is the timeline that Atkinson envisioned, and I wish I lived in it. We've lost a true visionary. Memory eternal!
> One of Bill Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of course, on a computer screen there are no layers of pixels underneath the pixels that you see, so there are no windows actually lurking underneath the ones that appear to be on top. To create the illusion of overlapping windows requires complex coding that involves what are called “regions.” Atkinson pushed himself to make this trick work because he thought he had seen this capability during his visit to Xerox PARC. In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were amazed that he had done so. “I got a feeling for the empowering aspect of naïveté”, Atkinson said. “Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.” He was working so hard that one morning, in a daze, he drove his Corvette into a parked truck and nearly killed himself. Jobs immediately drove to the hospital to see him. “We were pretty worried about you”, he said when Atkinson regained consciousness. Atkinson gave him a pained smile and replied, “Don’t worry, I still remember regions.”
When I was on the ColorSync team at Apple we, the engineers, got an invite to his place-in-the-woods one day.
I knew who he was at the time, but for some reason I felt I was more or less beholden to conversing only about color-related issues and how they applied to a computer workflow. Having retired, I have been kicking myself for some time not just chatting with him about ... whatever.
He was at the time I met him very in to a kind of digital photography. My recollection was that he had a high-end drum scanner and was in fact scanning film negatives (medium format camera?) and then going with a digital workflow from that point on. I remember he was excited about the way that "darks" could be captured (with the scanner?). A straight analog workflow would, according to him, cause the darks to roll off (guessing the film was not the culprit then, perhaps the analog printing process).
He excitedly showed us on his computer photos he took along the Pacific ocean of large rock outcroppings against the ocean — pointing out the detail that you could see in the shadow of the rocks. He was putting together a coffee table book of his photos at the time.
I have to say that I mused at the time about a wealthy, retired, engineer who throws money at high end photo gear and suddenly thinks they're a photographer. I think I was weighing his "technical" approach to photography vs. a strictly artistic one. Although, having learned more about Ansel Adams technical chops, perhaps for the best photographers there is overlap.
Bill's contribution with HyperCard is of course legendary. Apart from the experience of classrooms and computer labs in elementary schools, it was also the primary software powering a fusion of bridge-simulator-meets-live-action-drama field trips (among many other things) for over 20 years at the Space Center in central Utah.[0] I was one of many beneficiaries of this program as a participant, volunteer, and staff member. It was among the best things I've ever done.
That seed crystal of software shaped hundreds of thousands of students that to this day continue to rave about this program (although the last bits of HyperCard retired permanently about 12 years ago, nowadays it's primarily web based tech).
HyperCard's impact on teaching students to program starship simulators, and then telling compelling, interactive, immersive, multi-player dramatic stories in those ships is something enabled by Atkinson's dream in 1985.
May your consciousness journey between infinite pools of light, Bill.
Also, if you've read this far, go donate to Pancreatic Cancer research.[1]
I first met Bill over video-chat during 2020 and we got to know each other a bit. He later sent me a gift that changed my life. We hadn't talked for the past couple years, but I know he experienced "death" before and was as psychologically prepared as anyone could be. I have no doubt that he handled the biggest trip of his life with grace. We didn't always see eye-to-eye when it came to software, but we did share a mutual interest in the unknown, and the meaning of it all. Meet ya on the other side, Bill.
I asked Bill if he thought I could become an engineer even after earning my degree in sociology and political science. I really enjoyed writing software at the time but had no formal training. He laughed as he did and said of course, and you will be better than most. He found it as a strength and not a weakness. I will miss him.
If you haven't, check out the documentary[0] on General Magic which Bill co-founded in 1990. Among the more remarkable scenes in there is when a member of the public seems perplexed by the thought that they would even want to "check email from Times Square."
An unthinkable future, but they thought it. And yet, most folks have never heard of General Magic.
I never met Bill, and he never knew I existed, but he has had such a huge impact on my career, my family and my prosperity. I started my programming passion on the Apple II and switch to the Mac in 1984 after seeing MacPaint. Hypercard was very impactful on my logical thinking, paraded the incredibility of possibilities from this machine, and taught me how to conceptualise information. His humble efforts have had such a profound affect. I'm so very full of grief upon hearing this news.
Atkinson's HyperCard was released in 1987, before the widespread adoption of the web. HyperCard introduced concepts like interactive stacks of cards, scripting, and linking, which were later adopted and expanded upon in the web. Robert Cailliau, who assisted Tim Berners-Lee in developing the first web browser, was influenced by HyperCard's hyperlink concept.
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.
I was amazed by Bill's software seeing it on a Mac back then - MacPaint mostly, then HyperCard. I was not even 10, but I was already programming, and spent hours trying to figure out how to implement MacPaint's Lasso on my humble ZX Spectrum. (With some success, but not quite as elegant...)
If you want to experience HyperCard, John Earnest (RodgerTheGreat on HN[0]) built Decker[1] that runs on both the web and natively, and captures the aesthetic and most stuff perfectly. It uses Lil as a programming language - it is different than HyperTalk, but beautiful in its own right. (It doesn't read as English quite the way HyperTalk does, but it is more regular and easier to write - it's a readable/writable vector language, quite unlike those other ones ...)
One of my favourite Atkinson stories -- I can't remember if this is on folklore.org or somewhere else -- is that he actually implemented editable text in MacPaint, by scanning the bitmap for character shapes, but chose not to ship that feature because it could never be perfect. Amazing technical skill and great taste and judgement.
My time with Atkinson came before the Macintosh, before Hypercard. As a company Apple was struggling and we were preparing for what, in retrospect, was the really terrible Apple III. It was a less optimistic time -- after the Apple II and before the Macintosh.
A digression: the roster of Apple-related pancreatic cancer victims is getting longer -- Jef Raskin (2005), Steve Jobs (2011), now Bill Atkinson (2025). The overall pancreatic cancer occurrence rate is 14 per 100,000, so such a cluster is surprising within a small group, but the scientist in me wants to argue that it's just a coincidence, signifying nothing.
Maybe it's the stress of seeing how quickly one's projects become historical footnotes, erased by later events. And maybe it's irrational to expect anything else.
Oh man, he's a legend. My condolences to any family members passing by in remembrance. My highest respect goes to those with the tenacity and character required to force a good idea into existence. Bill inspired many people. While reading about him in "Revolution in the Valley", it felt like it recalibrated my own personal compass and gave me a sense of purpose in my own endeavors.
Wow. One of the absolute greatest. The world truly is a different place because of Bill. Bill’s importance in the history of computing cannot be overstated. Hypercard is probably my favorite invention of his. So ahead of its time. Rest in peace Bill
I know nothing about the fundamentals of “old computing” like what Mr. Atkinson worked on as I am only 27 and have much more contemporary experience. That being said, I still very greatly mourn the loss of these old head techs because the world of tech I use today would not have been possible if not for these incredibly smart and talented individuals. To learn to code without YouTube is truly a feat I could not imagine, and the world will be a lesser place without this kind of ingenuity. Hopefully he’s making some computers in the sky a bit better!
I was just musing to a young team member the other day that I think OOP comes easy to me because I learned HyperCard (v1.2 on System 6 on an SE) at a young age. RIP.
Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld were my childhood heroes through their work. Inside Macintosh was a series that enlightened my teen years. Thanks, Bill.
Atkinson is a legendary UX pioneer. Great technical skill and a deep understanding of the principles of interaction. His work, from the double click to HyperCard, continues to inspire my own work. You will be missed.
I'm yet another child of HyperCard. It opened my mind to what computers could be for, and even though the last two decades have been full primarily of disappointment, I still hold onto that other path as a possibility, or even as a slice of reality---a few weeds growing in the cracks of our dystopian concrete.
Another death from pancreatic cancer. I really hope we can figure out why rates are skyrocketing because it is a silent killer and usually isn’t detected until it’s too late.
I fondly remember creating simple narrative stories and games with HyperCard at 6 years old on my dad's Macintosh SE. It was my first contact with programming and a fundamental seed to using the computer as a creative tool. It has shaped my life in a substantial way. RIP Bill - HN bar should be blacked out.
I was just telling someone about the story of how he invented bitmapping for overlapping windows in the first Mac GUI in like two weeks, largely because he mis-remembered that being already a feature in the Xerox PARC demo and was convinced it was already possible.
Atkinson's work is so influential. From his contributions to the Macintosh team, to HyperCard, Bill was an inspiration to me and showed the power of merging art & technology.
Some of his old demos of graphics capabilities on the Mac or hypercard are around on YouTube, and I watched some maybe 10 years ago. He displayed not just the tech chops but he was a good communicator. RIP.
HyperCard was my introduction to programming. It was the first time I used a programming language on my mom’s old Macintosh IIci. It really has been a long time. Thank you, Bill.
DonHopkins on Dec 13, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bill Atkinson: Reflections on the 40th anniversary...
I recently posted these thoughts about Bill Atkinson, and links to articles and a recent interview he gave to Brad Myers' user interface class at CMU:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726302
Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different drugs. The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.
"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...
PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.
With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!
pvg on Dec 13, 2019 | prev [–]
Was this bit about LSD and Hypercard covered before what seems like a 2016 interview and some later articles? So much has been written about HyperCard (and MacPaint and QuickDraw) I'm wondering if I somehow managed to miss it in all that material.
DonHopkins on Dec 13, 2019 | parent | next [–]
As far as I know, the first time Bill Atkinson publically mentioned that LSD inspired HyperCard was in an interview with Leo Laporte on Apr 25th 2016, which claims to be "Part 2". I have searched all over for part 1 but have not been able to find it.
Then Mondo 2000 published a transcript of that part of the interview on June 18 2018, and I think a few other publications repeated it around that time.
And later on Feb 4, 2019 he gave a live talk to Brad Myers' "05-640: Interaction Techniques" user interface design class at CMU, during which he read the transcript.
It's well worth watching that interview. He went over and explained all of his amazing Polaroids of Lisa development, which I don't think have ever been published anywhere else.
Then at 1:03:15 a student asked him the million dollar question: what was the impetus and motivation behind HyperCard? He chuckled, reached for the transcript he had off-camera, and then out of the blue he asked the entire class "How many of you guys have done ... a psychedelic?" (Brad reported "No hands", but I think some may have been embarrassed to admit it in front of their professor). So then Bill launched into reading the transcript of the LSD HyperCard story, and blew all the students' minds.
The next week I gave a talk to the same class that Bill had just traumatized by asking if they'd done illegal drugs, and (at 37:11) I trolled them by conspiratorially asking: "One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ... (pregnant pause) ... HyperCard? Basically, because in 1987 I saw HyperCard, and it fucking blew my mind." Then I launched into my description of how important and amazing HyperCard was.
Here is an index of all of the videos from Brad Myers' interaction techniques class, including Rob Haitani (Palm Pilot), Shumin Zhai (text input and swipe method), Dan Bricklin (spreadsheets, Demo prototyping tool), Don Hopkins (pie menus), and Bill Atkinson (Mac, HyperCard):
Oh. I came here to pass the time as I built a TinyMac with a Pi and was compiling BasiliskII in SDL mode. I'm quite saddened by the news, as Bill was one of the people who had the most influence in the technical design of early Macs (and a brilliant engineer for all accounts).
Bill Atkinson has died
(daringfireball.net)1586 points by romanhn 7 June 2025 | 273 comments
Comments
> One of Bill Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of course, on a computer screen there are no layers of pixels underneath the pixels that you see, so there are no windows actually lurking underneath the ones that appear to be on top. To create the illusion of overlapping windows requires complex coding that involves what are called “regions.” Atkinson pushed himself to make this trick work because he thought he had seen this capability during his visit to Xerox PARC. In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were amazed that he had done so. “I got a feeling for the empowering aspect of naïveté”, Atkinson said. “Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.” He was working so hard that one morning, in a daze, he drove his Corvette into a parked truck and nearly killed himself. Jobs immediately drove to the hospital to see him. “We were pretty worried about you”, he said when Atkinson regained consciousness. Atkinson gave him a pained smile and replied, “Don’t worry, I still remember regions.”
I knew who he was at the time, but for some reason I felt I was more or less beholden to conversing only about color-related issues and how they applied to a computer workflow. Having retired, I have been kicking myself for some time not just chatting with him about ... whatever.
He was at the time I met him very in to a kind of digital photography. My recollection was that he had a high-end drum scanner and was in fact scanning film negatives (medium format camera?) and then going with a digital workflow from that point on. I remember he was excited about the way that "darks" could be captured (with the scanner?). A straight analog workflow would, according to him, cause the darks to roll off (guessing the film was not the culprit then, perhaps the analog printing process).
He excitedly showed us on his computer photos he took along the Pacific ocean of large rock outcroppings against the ocean — pointing out the detail that you could see in the shadow of the rocks. He was putting together a coffee table book of his photos at the time.
I have to say that I mused at the time about a wealthy, retired, engineer who throws money at high end photo gear and suddenly thinks they're a photographer. I think I was weighing his "technical" approach to photography vs. a strictly artistic one. Although, having learned more about Ansel Adams technical chops, perhaps for the best photographers there is overlap.
That seed crystal of software shaped hundreds of thousands of students that to this day continue to rave about this program (although the last bits of HyperCard retired permanently about 12 years ago, nowadays it's primarily web based tech).
HyperCard's impact on teaching students to program starship simulators, and then telling compelling, interactive, immersive, multi-player dramatic stories in those ships is something enabled by Atkinson's dream in 1985.
May your consciousness journey between infinite pools of light, Bill.
Also, if you've read this far, go donate to Pancreatic Cancer research.[1]
[0]: https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org [1]: https://pancan.org
An unthinkable future, but they thought it. And yet, most folks have never heard of General Magic.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek
Here's a little 6 minute clip: An acid trip, and the origins of Hypercard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdJKjBHCh18
It's really sad to see desktop apps adopt hamburger menus and things that make sense on mobile but make life harder on a desktop built for WIMP.
Thank you, Bill! Some days I'd rather be using your interface.
https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html --- something to bring up whenever lines of code as a metric is put forward
https://www.folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html --- story of how the Macintosh Finder came to be
https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html --- surviving a car accident
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.
I was amazed by Bill's software seeing it on a Mac back then - MacPaint mostly, then HyperCard. I was not even 10, but I was already programming, and spent hours trying to figure out how to implement MacPaint's Lasso on my humble ZX Spectrum. (With some success, but not quite as elegant...)
If you want to experience HyperCard, John Earnest (RodgerTheGreat on HN[0]) built Decker[1] that runs on both the web and natively, and captures the aesthetic and most stuff perfectly. It uses Lil as a programming language - it is different than HyperTalk, but beautiful in its own right. (It doesn't read as English quite the way HyperTalk does, but it is more regular and easier to write - it's a readable/writable vector language, quite unlike those other ones ...)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RodgerTheGreat
[1] https://beyondloom.com/decker/
A digression: the roster of Apple-related pancreatic cancer victims is getting longer -- Jef Raskin (2005), Steve Jobs (2011), now Bill Atkinson (2025). The overall pancreatic cancer occurrence rate is 14 per 100,000, so such a cluster is surprising within a small group, but the scientist in me wants to argue that it's just a coincidence, signifying nothing.
Maybe it's the stress of seeing how quickly one's projects become historical footnotes, erased by later events. And maybe it's irrational to expect anything else.
Steve turned to look at Bill. "Bill, how long did you spend writing Quickdraw?"
"Well, I worked on it on and off for four years", Bill replied.
Steve paused for a beat and then turned back to the Byte reporter. "Twenty-four man-years. We invested twenty-four man-years in QuickDraw."
Obviously, Steve figured that one Atkinson year equaled six man years, which may have been a modest estimate.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Mythical_Man_Year.txt
rip
He and his associated printed and sent tons of photography all around the world.
The was loved among photographers as well. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photocard-by-bill-atkinson/id3...
I'm yet another child of HyperCard. It opened my mind to what computers could be for, and even though the last two decades have been full primarily of disappointment, I still hold onto that other path as a possibility, or even as a slice of reality---a few weeds growing in the cracks of our dystopian concrete.
RIP to a legend
Thanks for everything, Bill — Rest in Peace.
RIP Mr Bill Atkinson
Can we get a better link maybe on the homepage ?
I will continue to admire him and his way of problem solving, speaking about your past work -- successes and lessons learned
What a tribute! He was famous at the time, though now perhaps an unsung hero in leading us into a GUI world.
I spent countless hours building HyperCard stacks and creating artwork in MacPaint, in college. A true legend.
RIP. Fat Bits forever.
He was a good man and great engineer.
RIP
Bill on Steve Jobs and HyperCard:
https://youtu.be/kzKCZN3UsRQ?si=eNIsysWdrjp2tHwd
Black bar, please.
DonHopkins on Dec 13, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bill Atkinson: Reflections on the 40th anniversary...
I recently posted these thoughts about Bill Atkinson, and links to articles and a recent interview he gave to Brad Myers' user interface class at CMU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726302
Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different drugs. The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.
"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:
https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...
Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Including polaroids of early Lisa development.
About PhotoCard:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110303033205/http://www.billat...
PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.
With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!
pvg on Dec 13, 2019 | prev [–]
Was this bit about LSD and Hypercard covered before what seems like a 2016 interview and some later articles? So much has been written about HyperCard (and MacPaint and QuickDraw) I'm wondering if I somehow managed to miss it in all that material.
DonHopkins on Dec 13, 2019 | parent | next [–]
As far as I know, the first time Bill Atkinson publically mentioned that LSD inspired HyperCard was in an interview with Leo Laporte on Apr 25th 2016, which claims to be "Part 2". I have searched all over for part 1 but have not been able to find it. Then Mondo 2000 published a transcript of that part of the interview on June 18 2018, and I think a few other publications repeated it around that time.
And later on Feb 4, 2019 he gave a live talk to Brad Myers' "05-640: Interaction Techniques" user interface design class at CMU, during which he read the transcript.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/schedule....
It's well worth watching that interview. He went over and explained all of his amazing Polaroids of Lisa development, which I don't think have ever been published anywhere else.
See Bill Atkinson's Lisa development polaroids:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill_Atki...
Then at 1:03:15 a student asked him the million dollar question: what was the impetus and motivation behind HyperCard? He chuckled, reached for the transcript he had off-camera, and then out of the blue he asked the entire class "How many of you guys have done ... a psychedelic?" (Brad reported "No hands", but I think some may have been embarrassed to admit it in front of their professor). So then Bill launched into reading the transcript of the LSD HyperCard story, and blew all the students' minds.
See video of Bill's talk:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
The next week I gave a talk to the same class that Bill had just traumatized by asking if they'd done illegal drugs, and (at 37:11) I trolled them by conspiratorially asking: "One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ... (pregnant pause) ... HyperCard? Basically, because in 1987 I saw HyperCard, and it fucking blew my mind." Then I launched into my description of how important and amazing HyperCard was.
See video of Don's talk:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Here is an index of all of the videos from Brad Myers' interaction techniques class, including Rob Haitani (Palm Pilot), Shumin Zhai (text input and swipe method), Dan Bricklin (spreadsheets, Demo prototyping tool), Don Hopkins (pie menus), and Bill Atkinson (Mac, HyperCard):
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...
Why isn't the black bar up atop the site?