Bill Atkinson, creator of MacPaint and HyperCard, diagnosed with pancreatic cancer

Bill Atkinson, creator of MacPaint and HyperCard …

Life is full of surprises (the bad and the good), and if you live long enough, you have either had some yourself or seen them come for close friends or family of yours. And haven seen such, you would think you would be prepared to hear the good or bad news for about just anyone. Not always. I was floored (felt like a punch in the stomach reading the headline for the first time) when I saw this, via an Adam Engst article in his TidBITS.com article of Monday, November 18:

Bill Atkinson Diagnosed With Pancreatic Cancer

If you click on that headline above, you can read Adam’s well-written post about where he discovered this news, Bill’s reaction (amazingly positive) and reflections on Atkinson.

Bill was one of the original Macintosh development team programmers, a creative genius. The original Macintosh came out of the box with only 2 pieces of software: MacWrite and MacPaint. MacPaint was Bill’s masterpiece. About 3-4 years later, he created HyperCard — a user-friendly coding software platform using, get this … PLAIN ENGLISH! HyperCard empowered thousands and thousands of Mac users who were not programmers to create and build their own HyperCard “Stacks” that could do just about anything.

I met Atkinson at a class he taught at MacWorld Expo in S.F. one year. I was one of those greatly empowered HyperCard users when he first released the software (also telling then Apple CEO John Sculley that he wanted to give HyperCard away FREE with the Mac, and if Apple didn’t … he would quit). I did some amazing stuff with it, if I do say so myself. And, of course, I bought the original 128k Macintosh almost solely on the basis of seeing MacPaint on the screen all those decades ago.
As he asked, my prayers are lifted for him. — Steve/OMUG

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