9 Jun
2025
9 Jun
'25
4:35 p.m.
Bill Atkinson, a true early microcomputer pioneer, ca. 1984+, brought
drawing on a computer screen and linking to external files a reality. He
will be missed.
Murray--
9 Jun
9 Jun
4:48 p.m.
Drawing on a computer screen goes back at least a decade from that (PLATO had it back
then) if not more.
paul
On Jun 9, 2025, at 7:35 PM, Murray McCullough via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Bill Atkinson, a true early microcomputer pioneer, ca. 1984+, brought
drawing on a computer screen and linking to external files a reality. He
will be missed.
Murray--
5:47 p.m.
> On Jun 9, 2025, at 7:35 PM, Murray McCullough via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
> Bill Atkinson, a true early microcomputer pioneer, ca. 1984+, brought
> drawing on a computer screen and linking to external files a reality. He
On Mon, 9 Jun 2025, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
Drawing on a computer screen goes back at least a
decade from that (PLATO had it back then) if not more.
Wasn't responsible for MacPaint?
That was not "first", or even early, but it was significant.
. . .and wasn't he heavily involved in creating HyperCard, and the Mac
pull-down menus?
I think that he was the one who said, "The Mac was supposed to have four
major software packages; but by the time that it was released, those had
become MacWrite, MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacPaint"
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
8:19 p.m.
On Jun 9, 2025, at 5:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Wasn't responsible for MacPaint?
That was not "first", or even early, but it was significant.
. . .and wasn't he heavily involved in creating HyperCard, and the Mac pull-down
menus?
I think that he was the one who said, "The Mac was supposed to have four major
software packages; but by the time that it was released, those had become MacWrite,
MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacPaint”
Yes, he was responsible for MacPaint, and HyperCard, and the creation of pull-down menus,
and QuickDraw, and the window manager, and...
He wasn’t the one to make “drawing on a computer screen [...] [a] reality” but he was
responsible for quite a bit of what people recognize as a modern computer interface,
including a mechanisms for allowing a window to continue to update when partially obscured
by another window, a menu, etc. That’s what his “region” data structure was for, which is
an extremely clever way to compactly encode a non-rectangular area of pixels that also
supports very fast membership tests.
-- Chris
10 Jun
10 Jun
6:03 a.m.
Yup, way back:
https://www.twz.com/26959/the-futuristic-cold-war-era-sage-air-defense-bunk…
Early 1960’s.
Marc
On Mon, Jun 9, 2025 at 8:14 PM Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Drawing on a computer screen goes back at least a
decade from that (PLATO
had it back then) if not more.
paul
On Jun 9, 2025, at 7:35 PM, Murray McCullough via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Bill Atkinson, a true early microcomputer pioneer, ca. 1984+, brought
drawing on a computer screen and linking to external files a reality. He
will be missed.
Murray--
8:32 a.m.
There was Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad in 1963(?)
https://www.invent.org/inductees/ivan-e-sutherland
Will
On 06/09/2025 7:48 PM EDT Paul Koning via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Drawing on a computer screen goes back at least a decade from that (PLATO had it back
then) if not more.
paul
> On Jun 9, 2025, at 7:35 PM, Murray McCullough via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Bill Atkinson, a true early microcomputer pioneer, ca. 1984+, brought
> drawing on a computer screen and linking to external files a reality. He
> will be missed.
>
> Murray--
You just can't beat the person who never gives up.
Babe Ruth
13 Jun
13 Jun
9:29 a.m.
On Tue, 10 Jun 2025 at 00:44, Murray McCullough via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
drawing on a computer screen
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.
linking to external files
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
10:40 a.m.
Very nice article!
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 13, 2025, at 09:39, Liam Proven via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Tue, 10 Jun 2025 at 00:44, Murray McCullough via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
drawing on a computer screen
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.
linking to external files
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
15 Jun
15 Jun
7:36 a.m.
I stand corrected on my original note. I guess the art of correctness, even
in the highly-technical world of computing, should be adhered to. The
anti-science, so rapid in today's world, demands we attribute originality,
preserving individual success.
Murray 🙂
On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 2:29 PM Wayne S via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Very nice article!
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 13, 2025, at 09:39, Liam Proven via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On Tue, 10 Jun 2025 at 00:44, Murray McCullough via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
objected!
drawing on a computer screen
That is such a vague way of putting it that I'm not surprised people
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.
linking to external files
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
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