This week, as Apple fans pore over every last bit of news from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), we should remember the passing of one of Apple’s all-time greats: Bill Atkinson, who passed away from pancreatic cancer on June 5.
Also: Is this the end of Intel-based Macs? Apple confirms bittersweet update policy for MacOS
His influence extended far beyond Apple. His pioneering work in graphics libraries was responsible for Apple’s Lisa and Mac interfaces. All modern graphical user interfaces (GUIs) owe a debt of gratitude to Atkinson. Beyond that influence, however, his HyperCard software provided the framework for the first web browsers, and its impact can still be seen in every browser we use today.
Before he turned his hand to those innovations, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had been desperate to get him on board with Apple. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography ‘Steve Jobs‘, Atkinson first declined Apple’s request to work at the company, so Jobs sent Atkinson a plane ticket to come out and see him and then pitched him for three hours.
Also: How to install MacOS 26 on your MacBook (and which models support it)
Jobs told him: “Think about surfing on the front edge of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-paddling at the tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun. Come down here and make a dent in the universe.” Atkinson was sold.
As tech journalist Steve Levy reported in his history of the Mac, ‘Insanely Great‘, Atkinson once said, after he’d shown Levy an image on a prototype Mac, “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.” He was right.
Atkinson’s enduring legacy lies in his foundational work on the GUI for Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh computers. Before these innovations, personal computers were dominated by text-based interfaces and arcane command lines. Atkinson’s QuickDraw software library was the technological engine that made it possible to display shapes, images, and text fluidly on screen, enabling the now-familiar simulated “desktop” with icons, windows, and menus.
Andy Hertzfeld, another early key Mac developer, considered QuickDraw “the single most significant component of the original Macintosh technology” because it enabled users to “push pixels around in the frame buffer at blinding speeds to create the celebrated user interface.”
Also: Your MacBook is getting a free upgrade: The 5 best MacOS 26 features Apple just announced
QuickDraw’s speed and sophistication allowed overlapping windows and smooth graphical operations, a feat considered the “crown jewel” of Apple’s early technology. Atkinson also introduced the concept of “regions” in QuickDraw, a data structure that made complex window management possible.
He was also credited with inventing or popularizing several GUI staples, including the menu bar, pull-down menus, the double-click, and the selection lasso. Atkinson’s attention to detail extended to the “RoundRect,” the rounded rectangles that became a hallmark of Apple’s visual design.
As David Gewirtz, ZDNET writer and a colleague of Atkinson, told me, “Pretty much if you move a pixel on screen graphically in any computer or device, anywhere, it’s got Bill’s DNA in it.” Atkinson was indeed one of the fathers of personal computing.
He didn’t just work on backend programs. Atkinson also wrote MacPaint, the forerunner of all graphics programs, including Photoshop. If you do anything with making or editing images on a computer, you owe him a debt of gratitude.
Also: Everything announced at Apple’s WWDC 2025 keynote: Liquid Glass, MacOS Tahoe, and more
As influential as he was on the desktop, his big contribution to modern technology was with HyperCard. Released in 1987, HyperCard was a groundbreaking hypermedia authoring tool that let users build interactive “stacks” of cards containing text, images, and buttons. Described by Atkinson as a “software erector set,” HyperCard empowered non-programmers to create databases, games, and educational tools, and introduced the concept of hypertext navigation to everyday users, years before the World Wide Web.
With its simple, English-like scripting language, HyperTalk, HyperCard enabled people with little or no programming experience to build custom interactive applications. This democratized software creation embodied the idea of “programming for the rest of us.”
In a panel discussion years later, Atkinson described HyperCard as “the first glimmer of a web browser, but chained to a hard drive. Perhaps the most significant impact that HyperCard has had is not on the HyperCard stacks that people created, but rather on how it has influenced the lives of its users and shaped the development of subsequent technologies. Like the designers of Mosaic, the first popular web browser, said, HyperCard was a great inspiration to them.
Atkinson added that HyperCard was “open source before open source was cool. The primary requirement of the HyperTalk language was that it be readable by somebody who could look at and see what was going on. It was like an open-source programming environment because people exchanged HyperCard stacks. It was sort of GitHub before GitHub.”
Also: Your iPhone is getting these useful features with iOS 26 – including a big AI one
Others also saw HyperText’s potential. Gewirtz, who founded Hyperpress, the first developer tools company for HyperCard, and author of the second book about HyperCard, had hopes that HyperCard would prove far more popular than it was. Gewirtz recalled, “Atkinson’s deal with Apple was that HyperCard was to be made available for free. But Apple’s managers at the time (I know, because I had these discussions hundreds of times with them) did not understand the power of either recreational programming or non-professional programmers, so they didn’t believe in HyperCard as much as their users did.”
As a result, once Jobs left Apple in 1985 after an internal business fight, Atkinson and HyperCard’s days were numbered. He eventually left Hertzfeld to found General Magic, a company trying to build the first tablet. Alas, the technology of the day couldn’t deliver on his dream. One of his colleagues, Tony Fadell, went to Apple later and helped create the iPod.
He would spend his final years on his passion, nature photography. As Atkinson wrote after he learned of his cancer diagnosis, “At 73 years, I have already lived an amazing and wonderful life. I have loved and been loved, beginning with my remarkable mother who believed in me. With my work at Apple and General Magic, I am grateful that I could make positive contributions to the lives of many millions of people.”
I’m grateful to live in the world he helped shape. We all should be.