Bill Atkinson gone also

 Okay I hope this trend doesn't continue.   First, notes about John Young passing.  Then a retrospective about John Doyle.   As I was about to close the computer for the day, John Markoff sent along his obit for Bill Atkinson, which is a very nice tribute to an incredibly inventive guy   https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-dead.html

Bill was 'bigger than life' in the early Apple days.   HyperCard was perhaps his biggest intellectual contribution from my standpoint; others loved QuickDraw and of course it and 'regions' enabled the entire graphical metaphor of the Lisa, followed by the MacIntosh.   

We got close to some of this work, for various reasons.  Despite the laudatory comments from Markoff, I believe that it is fact that HP, and in particular my Colorado Springs team, got the patents for pull-down menus for our logic analyzers circa 1976, long before Bill's more visible contributions.  Much later, 1990, our team at HP Sunnyvale, with HP VUE, "won" the Design Awards for icon designs rather than the Mac.  See the HP Phenomenon, p. 235

june 1, 1990, great falls, virginia: For the second time in two years, HP graphics artist and user interface designer (and leader of HP’s Corporate Engineering Industrial Design team) Barry Mathis got a letter from the Industrial Designers Society of America. This one opened, “It is with great pleasure that the jurors bestow the 1990 Gold IDEA to the HP Visual User Environment . . . with over 535 products, VUE 2.0 stood out.” The three-dimensional elements of VUE—called Motif—had won the year before, not long after the design swept the OSF Graphical User Interface (GUI) competition against forty-two other entries.50 BYTE magazine also selected Motif as its User Interface Software of the Year in 1990. Once again, HP had solid reason to be proud of the industrial design and human factors heritage begun forty years earlier. When Microsoft later embedded the “New Wave look-and-feel” of the Motif design widgets into Windows—Windows 3.1—it gave them near parity with Apple’s MacIntosh GUI, and ignited a patent suit filed by Apple against Microsoft and HP over intellectual property rights for industrial design.51 To many observers, it was a laughable suit—the common Silicon Valley view was that Apple itself had stolen the Xerox PARC GUI design shamelessly; to sue others for building an open systems software design tool was ludicrous.   in a fast-track decision, the judicial system agreed with HP and Microsoft that the suit was groundless, and the suit was tossed out.

I had worked with Doug Engelbart starting in 1966 because of my novel (for the day) graphics box, and we put a lot of user-interface design thought and time into these areas over many years.  It is from this 'first-hand' perspective that one could really appreciate the work and genius of Bill Atkinson.

David Smith, now at Croquet Corp, had a nice squib a few months back about Bill that adds to Markoff's 'regions' story: A very interesting story is that when Bill Atkinson was watching the demos of dragging windows he thought he was seeing the actual window being moved and the screen being updated dynamically. That was not what was actually happening though - they were using a much faster to draw outline and then the screen refreshed after the drop. But Bill, not realizing it was a very good magic act, decided he needed to figure out how they did what they hadn't actually done. The result was Bill invented "regions", perhaps one of the most beautiful concepts in computer graphics ever realized. It, more than anything enabled the Macintosh user experience we first saw. A quick aside was that Dan Ingalls, who gave the demo to Atikinson and Jobs - invented BitBlt, which was the foundational element of the Smalltalk/Alto graphics engine and how it was able to do so much. I actually wrote the first realtime 3D adventure/shooter for that first Macintosh. I was actually able to use regions for most of the rendering and bitblt for updating the screen. Did you know that the first 128k mac enabled page flipping? And just like on the Alto, the screen ate all the memory - actually on the Alto, the memory would eat the screen...

Smith himself is a major contributor to this space, and we cited Smith's work in filing for our AstroVirtual patents several years ago.   I cannot help but think that this era is drawing to a close--Atkinson was one of the giants who defined it all.