“The barrier between words and pictures is broken…until now, the world of art has been a sacred club. Like fine china. Now, it’s for daily use. We’re going to make it so easy to be creative that people will have no excuse not to confront their own artistic ability.”
— Bill Atkinson, quoted in Insanely Great by Steven Levy
I learned today that Bill Atkinson died on Thursday.
Atkinson is one of these people who’s hard to sum up. He was one of the key members of the original Macintosh team; an engineer and designer whose work defined a lot of the Mac experience. Atkinson’s engineering contributions gave the Mac much of its technical superiority in the 80s and 90s, but I think his design innovations are the aspect of his legacy that will last the longest. Most of us still use something influenced by Atkinson’s ideas on a daily basis, whether it’s pulling down a menu, double-clicking an icon, tapping a trash icon to delete something, or even browsing the web.
I’d say—personal opinion, but I don’t believe I’m wrong—that Atkinson’s impact on personal computing rivals that of Steve Jobs.
The first time I fully realized what the Mac was capable of was when I saw MacPaint.
I’ve heard a number of stories like this from early Mac users. I was 9. My dad had brought home a Mac—probably a Plus—from the college he worked at. He turned it on one night, and I watched as he launched MacPaint, drew a few circles, filled them with different patterns in a single click. I recall this moment with absolute clarity.
I’d never seen anything like it. We had a computer—a wheezing Rainbow 100—and I loved it, but it wasn’t capable of much more than word processing and rudimentary programming. The idea of being able to render graphics nearly the way you’d draw them on paper was stupefying. When we got a Mac a year or two later, I spent a lot of my time on it experimenting with MacPaint and MacDraw.
But Bill Atkinson also created another equally mind-bending Mac app, called HyperCard. That was usually where I was working when I wasn’t using MacPaint.
Mention HyperCard to anyone today, and you’ll probably get a blank look. For some of us, though, HyperCard changed how we interacted with our computers forever. Doing a deep dive on what HyperCard was and why it’s significant would require a whole other post, if not a book, but if you’re interested, the HyperCard Wikipedia page is a good place to start.
My dad had mentioned that he’d heard the Mac came with a programming tool. He hadn’t worked with it, but he had the manuals: several thick volumes filled with everything you needed to know to build HyperCard apps, or “stacks”, as Apple called them. I still remember the first stack I built. It had only one card with nothing on it except a small button icon. Click the icon and the Mac played a tinny sound effect: boing. One line of code.
I took those manuals everywhere: car trips, doctor’s offices, anywhere I’d have at least five minutes to dig through them. And I started using HyperCard a lot. It’s one of the reasons I went into web design. I’d been interested in interactive/user interface design before I knew there was even a term for it—I have, somewhere, a crayoned-up sheet of paper from 1987 or so where I was sketching an idea for an interactive storybook interface—but in the early 1990s, there were not a lot of options for doing that kind of work. HyperCard was one of the first WYSIWYG tools for building software; relatively simple software, at least compared to what was possible in Pascal or C++, but usable apps nonetheless.
It’s hard to describe the sense of power that HyperCard gave you. I’m a strong believer in having as much control over one’s technology as possible, and HyperCard made it possible to build tools you needed—purpose-specific stuff that solved some problem no other app addressed. I built dashboards and productivity tools. I prototyped apps and user interface concepts. I used HyperCard to sketch out what I imagined the ultimate user-friendly OS would look like: a literal desk in a virtual office.
On the one hand, I remember those designs with the same internal shudder that a lot of us experience when we recall what we thought was cool and original at age 13. On the other, however, over-the-top skeumorphism was something some pretty smart folks were exploring as well.
In 2001 or so, I even built a stack that could post short AIM-esque status messages to my website. (Imagine if I’d turned that idea into a startup.) I wrote software that my dad used for his research; I’m listed as co-author on those papers. I was able to do all this without having a background in software engineering, just like you no longer had to have graphic arts training or industrial printing equipment to design posters where images shared space with different typefaces.
For the first time in history, the power tools of digital creativity—the fine china, as Atkinson put it—were available for everyday use. Membership in the sacred clubs of the educated and brilliant (or, at least, those who had the time and inclination to learn C++ and the Macintosh Toolbox) was not a prerequisite to putting your visions into the world.
Today’s #notesArt is based on an icon that I spent a fair amount of time looking at back then. It was one of the default icons HyperCard provided; part of a vast built-in library of icons you could plug into your own interfaces.
I’m not sure who designed this icon. I’d wondered if it might have been Susan Kare, another early Apple person whose work shaped personal computer UI design on a fundamental level. She did do an icon portrait of Bill, but this isn’t it. My best guess is that the artist is either Kristee Kreitman or Marge Boots, Apple designers who created graphics for HyperCard.
How do I know it’s Bill? Besides the fact that it looks like him, I seem to recall that the name displayed under it (every icon had a name) was “Bill sez”.
I don’t think I ever used this icon for anything. It didn’t lend itself to practical functions the way an arrow or a house icon did, and it felt too character-specific to represent anything you’d typically use a “person” icon for, like “user settings”. Still, I’d scroll past it every time I was looking for icons. I always liked it—this little easter egg, a portrait of the guy whose software I was using. That was a thing in the 80s and 90s: you actually knew who wrote your apps. A lot of times, you even knew what they looked like.
Looking at Atkinson’s tiny portrait this evening, I couldn’t help but think about how it represented an era of computing that was truly personal, in a way that is becoming less and less so.
As far as “personal” in the easily accessible sense, technology has become personal to an extent that would have seemed implausibly optimistic even twenty years ago. The computing experience that cost $2,500 in 1984—close to $8,000 in today’s money—can be had for $25 today. At some point not too far from now, machines that would have been regarded as Star Trek-level advanced when I was a kid will probably be given away in cereal boxes.
But I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like technology has also never been more impersonal. That’s what strikes me about the tech I use every day: it’s flat and charmless, cluttered with distractions and upsells and junk. Any attempts at personality—bright colors, cute icons—are anodyne and formulaic, clearly crafted either by too many people or, more likely these days, no people at all. Overall, the values and priorities guiding today’s software design seem more aligned with those of Bill Gates than Bill Atkinson.
Atkinson’s work was personal in every way: shaped by his personal passions, designed to help other people realize theirs. The Mac wasn’t just a “personal” computer in that you didn’t have to be a company or university to own one. What made it personal for me was the fact that I knew it was designed by people. People who put their names in dialog boxes, hid their photos—and other things—in the software itself, and wrote about what they built and why it mattered. People who genuinely wanted to design good technology that made other people more capable of contributing to the world.
Thanks for everything, Bill. It mattered, a lot. Still does.