When we talk about the history of computing in recent decades, the names of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs ou Steve Wozniak often come to mind, both for their careers and for their fame or legacy. However, other actors, less known to the general public, have had an immense impact: Bill atkinson is one of them. Sadly, this brilliant engineer passed away on June 5, 2025, at the age of 74, in his home in Portola Valley (California), following a pancreatic cancer.
A computer genius, Bill Atkinson is notably the inventor of the double click, ancestor of Photoshop, and his contribution to Apple was crucial to the success of Steve Jobs and his Macintosh project. He was the great architect of the first graphical interfaces of the Mac, making computing accessible to millions of users, even without technical skills.
“Looking at his code was like admiring the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.”
Personally recruited by Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson became the 51st Apple employee, part of the small group of 30 people who developed the very first Macintosh. He was also the main designer of the graphical interface of the , with a revolutionary and particularly intuitive visual interface for the time.
Among his most notable creations: QuickDraw, macpaint et HyperCards.
So yes, these names may seem from another time, but QuickDraw was a kind of graphics library which allowed shapes, text and images to be displayed on the screen efficiently. It was this technology that allowed the Macintosh to have a desktop-style graphical interface, with its folders, files and icons, long before it was the norm.
This revolution, born at Apple thanks to Atkinson, then spread to all systems, regardless of the OS or brand. And that's not all: he is also credited with the invention of drop-down menus and of course the double click, this gesture, banal today, but revolutionary at the time.
Quick reminder: before the release of the Macintosh in January 1984, most personal computers were text-based and mice were almost non-existent. MS-DOS is a good example – although, ironically, it could handle graphics.
Fundamental contributions to Apple
Among Bill Atkinson's lasting legacy at Apple are:
- la menu bar,
- le selection lasso,
- the “ant march” selection animation,
- and even rounded corners of windows (developed with Jobs), still present today in the interfaces of the Apple products.
As a side note, the idea for QuickDraw came to him after studying the work of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), led by Alan Kay, a visionary computer scientist who dreamed of the Dynabook, a kind of educational laptop that would later inspire the Lisa and the Macintosh. Although the Xerox project was top secret, Jobs and a small Apple team had been invited to a private demo. They didn't get to see the code, so Apple engineers had to guess everything... and rebuild it their own way.
Le New York Times reports the words of Steve Perlman, a young Apple engineer who had used Atkinson's software to create the first color Macintosh:
“Seeing his code was like looking up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.”
And to add:
“His code was extraordinary. It’s what made the Macintosh possible.”
MacPaint, LSD and HyperCard: pioneers of the web before their time
Among his masterpieces, macpaint, a software of digital drawing ultra-intuitive that allowed anyone to draw or retouch images on the screen using a palette of graphic tools – brush icons, pens… Again, no need to be a computer scientist to create.
Later, while he was in the middle of an LSD trip, Atkinson had the idea for a program that would bring together text, image and video in a database that is easy to manipulate: it was HyperCards, a kind of precursor to the Web. He himself described the software as a "software construction game." Released in 1987, HyperCard paved the way for app development by non-programmers.
A strong relationship with Steve Jobs… then a fracture
In the 80 years, Atkinson and Jobs were inseparable. But when Jobs was ousted from Apple and founded NeXT, Atkinson refused to follow him, preferring to devote himself to HyperCardsA decision that somewhat cooled their relationship, even though he had insisted that this software be provided free with every Macintosh.
In the late 80s, he co-founded with Andy Hertzfield (another Mac legend) and Marc Porat (economist) society General Magic, who wanted to revolutionize computing with a handheldThe project competed with the Apple NewtonBoth failed commercially, but are now seen as the predecessors of the iPhone and iPad.
After tech, nature
Bill Atkinson stayed at Apple from 1978 to 1990, then left General Magic in 1996. He then worked freelance on various projects, including numenta, a pioneering company in artificial intelligenceBut he gradually abandoned computers to turn to another passion: nature photography.
Congratulations on this article on Bill Atkinson, to whom today's computing owes so much!