[cctalk] Re: Bill Atkinson

On Tue, 10 Jun 2025 at 00:44, Murray McCullough via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: That is such a vague way of putting it that I'm not surprised people objected! He wrote MacPaint, which contained essentially the first modern toolbars in a GUI app and after which almost all other pixel-editors and many vector and other graphics editors are modelled. No... He wrote Hypercard, which was the first mass-market application to use _hyperlinks_ -- previously an obscure curiosity from Ted Nelson's Xanadu, which should have gone mainstream but didn't. Nothing to do with files. He also wrote LisaGraf which became Quickdraw. He designed and implemented regions, making it possible to efficiently draw into and update windows that were obscured by other windows. Smalltalk couldn't do that. He didn't believe it couldn't do, not knowing they'd skipped a very hard but very useful function, he worked out a way to efficiently implement it. He designed a dither algorithm that was as fast or faster than the dominant Floyd-Steinberg dither but could do areas of true black or white without a stipple. He designed much of the modern GUI, adding substantial functionality to Xerox PARC's Smalltalk, Alto and Star workstations' primitive GUIs. I wrote an obituary: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/11/bill_atkinson_obituary/ -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven(a)cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven(a)gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 227612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053