Bill Atkinson

Bill Atkinson ( born 1951 ) is an American programmer and nature photographer.

He worked in the late seventies and the early eighties at Apple and was among the first developers team of the company. He 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. In the development of only 45 kB large paint program MacPaint in the summer half of 1983, which runs at only 128 kB of RAM, it plays a key role. Similarly, the QuickDraw graphics library goes back to Atkinson. QuickDraw is a programming interface, which is fundamentally responsible for the graphical representation of the Lisa and Macintosh computers and software enables developers to use routines for displaying screen elements.

Atkinson developed in 1987 from a self-programmed notepad called " Quick File " the authoring system HyperCard, one of the first and most popular hypertext systems for creating multimedia applications. The development of HyperCard was closed in 1998, the HyperCard concept, however, was taken up by the company Runtime Revolution, developed and adapted to current technical standards.

Together with Andy Hertzfeld, who had come in 1979 as employee No. 435 at Apple, he founded in 1990 General Magic. After Bill Atkinson had already been through the age of ten in a photo competition, he has worked since 2002 as a nature photographer.