Bill Atkinson

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Bill Atkinson, developer of HyperCard software, speaks at the Berkeley Cybersalon on August 12, 2012 on the 25th anniversary of HyperCard

Bill Atkinson (* 1951 ) is an American programmer and wildlife photographer . He worked at Apple in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was part of the company's first development team.

Life

Atkinson studied at the University of California, San Diego , where the father of the Apple Macintosh Jef Raskin was one of his professors and brought him to Apple. There he was part of the original Macintosh development team. He played a key role in the development of the 45 kB MacPaint painting program in the summer of 1983, which runs with only 128 kB RAM. The QuickDraw graphics library also goes back to Atkinson. QuickDraw is a programming interface which is fundamentally responsible for the graphic display of the Lisa and Macintosh computers and offers software developers the opportunity to use routines for displaying screen elements.

In 1987 Atkinson developed the HyperCard authoring system from a self-programmed notepad called “Quickfile” , one of the first and most popular hypertext systems for creating multimedia applications . The development of HyperCard was stopped in 1998, but the HyperCard concept was taken up by the company Runtime Revolution , further developed and adapted to current technical standards.

Together with Andy Hertzfeld , who joined Apple in 1979 as employee no. 435, he founded General Magic in 1990 .

After taking part in a photo competition at the age of ten, Bill Atkinson has been working as a nature photographer since 2002.

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