January, 1984.
The grinning geek sitting with Steve Jobs and holding the first Macintosh computer is Bill Atkinson. He was Steve's most trusted and valued employee. He's one of those rare geniuses, like Steve himself, who has changed the world multiple times.
But unlike Steve, nobody remembers Bill Atkinson.
Yet his accomplishments with Apple are legendary:
- He was a key member of the Mac development team. The original Mac, of course, is arguably the most influential computer of all time, and Bill is a big reason why.
- He wrote the MacPaint application, the first great drawing app for computers, with a beautiful user interface that is copied to this day by just about every graphics application out there, including new tablet versions.
- He designed and implemented QuickDraw, the original Mac graphical subsystem API. QuickDraw gave the Mac high-performance graphics that were far and away beyond anything else on the market, and it was a fundamental reason why the Mac is famous for its graphics prowess. QuickDraw was so influential that 27 years later the APIs are still hooked into the Mac OS for compatibility, although QuickDraw itself has long since been replaced as the Mac's primary graphics rendering engine by Quartz.
- But probably his most influential creation was HyperCard. Released in 1987, HyperCard was the world's first workable "hypermedia system". It used something he called "hyperlinks" to chain related data together across forms. If that doesn't ring a big bell, know that the entire World Wide Web is built on the foundations pioneered by HyperCard. The "hypermedia system" the web uses is called "Hyper Text Markup Language", or HTML, and you can thank Bill Atkinson every time you load a page or click on a link on the web.
But unlike Steve, nobody remembers Bill Atkinson.
Yet his accomplishments with Apple are legendary:
- He was a key member of the Mac development team. The original Mac, of course, is arguably the most influential computer of all time, and Bill is a big reason why.
- He wrote the MacPaint application, the first great drawing app for computers, with a beautiful user interface that is copied to this day by just about every graphics application out there, including new tablet versions.
- He designed and implemented QuickDraw, the original Mac graphical subsystem API. QuickDraw gave the Mac high-performance graphics that were far and away beyond anything else on the market, and it was a fundamental reason why the Mac is famous for its graphics prowess. QuickDraw was so influential that 27 years later the APIs are still hooked into the Mac OS for compatibility, although QuickDraw itself has long since been replaced as the Mac's primary graphics rendering engine by Quartz.
- But probably his most influential creation was HyperCard. Released in 1987, HyperCard was the world's first workable "hypermedia system". It used something he called "hyperlinks" to chain related data together across forms. If that doesn't ring a big bell, know that the entire World Wide Web is built on the foundations pioneered by HyperCard. The "hypermedia system" the web uses is called "Hyper Text Markup Language", or HTML, and you can thank Bill Atkinson every time you load a page or click on a link on the web.
That is, if you can remember his name.
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