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Bill Atkinson has died

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Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#131

Post by pducks32 »

dkislyuk wrote: post #16

From Walter Isaacson's _Steve Jobs_: > One of Bill Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of cou…

Would someone mind explaining the technical aspect here? I feel with modern compute and OS paradigms I can’t appreciate this. But even now I know that feeling when you crack it and the thrill of getting the imposible to work.

It’s on all of us to keep the history of this field alive and honor the people who made it all possible. So if anyone would nerd out on this, I’d love to be able to remember him that way.

(I did read this https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html but might be not understanding it fully)

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#133

Post by accrual »

jamessinghal wrote: post #34
deadbabe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resources only help you reach your genetic potential, but if you’re just not built for longevity you still may not live long. And some people with no resources, no reason to live, but have incredible genetics will linger for many years beyond what people think is possible, like a weed.

People without resources or purpose are a weed?

Like a weed, in the sense of living in spite of ones circumstances. For example, a person with limited resources living for a long time, which is like a weed with little sunlight still growing from a crack in concrete.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#134

Post by btilly »

gdubs wrote: post #82
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #72

For anyone (like me) wondering who this guy was, he was a prominent UI guy at Apple back in the day. According to Wikipedia he created the menu bar, QuickDraw, and HyperCard. For whomever submits stories like this, please say who the person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I've heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.

Adding a bit more context: The World Wide Web arguably exists because of HyperCard. The idea that information can be hyperlinked together. Atkinson was a brilliant engineer. As critical to the launch of A Macintosh as anyone — efficient rendering of regions, overlapping windows, etc. And last but not least, Mac Paint. Every computer painting program in existence owes Atkinson a nod.

The idea that information can be hyperlinked together predated HyperCard by decades. It goes back to https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m..., which was written in 1945. The same essay also has the fundamental ideas for a citation index.

This gave rise both to the Science Citation Index and to various hypertext systems. For example the famous 1968 presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY, now known as "The Mother of All Demos", demonstrated a working hypertext system among the other jaw-dropping accomplishments.

HyperCard brought hypertext to commodity hardware. The Web made a distributed hypertext system viable. Google's PageRank recombined hypertext and the Science Citation Index to make the web more usable. And all of the key insights trace back to Vannevar Bush. Who was able to have such deep insights in 1945 because he had been working in, and thinking about, computing at least since 1927.

The history of important ideas in computing generally goes far deeper than most programmers are aware.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#135

Post by duskwuff »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #75
dkislyuk wrote: post #16

From Walter Isaacson's _Steve Jobs_: > One of Bill Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of cou…

With overlapping rectangular windows (slightly simpler case than ones with rounded corners) you can expect visible regions of windows that are not foremost to be, for example, perhaps "L" shaped, perhaps "T" shaped (if there are many windows and they overlap left and right edges). Bill's region structure was, as I understand it, more or less a RLE (run-length encoded) representation of the visible rows of a window's…

The QuickDraw source code refers to the contents of the Region structure as an "unpacked array of sorted inversion points". It's a little short on details, but you can sort of get a sense of how it works by looking at the implementation of PtInRgn(Point, RegionHandle):

https://github.com/historicalsource/supermario/blob/9dd3c4be...

As far as I can tell, it's a bounding box (in typical L/T/R/B format), followed by a sequence of the X/Y coordinates of every "corner" inside the region. It's fairly compact for most region shapes which arise from overlapping rectangular windows, and very fast to perform hit tests on.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#136

Post by duskwuff »

jajko wrote: post #46
dkislyuk wrote: post #16

From Walter Isaacson's _Steve Jobs_: > One of Bill Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of cou…

Pretty awesome story, but also with a bit of dark lining. Of course any owner, and triple that for Jobs, loves over-competent guys who work themselves to the death, here almost literally. But that's not a recipe for personal happiness for most people, and most of us would not end up contributing revolutionary improvements even if done so. World needs awesome workers, and we also need ie awesome parents or just happy…

That's not quite how I read the story. Jobs didn't ask Atkinson if he remembered regions - Atkinson brought it up.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#138

Post by ehaliewicz2 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #41
rjsw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference between the Apple and Xerox approach may be more complicated than the people at PARC not knowing how to do this. The Alto doesn't have a framebuffer, each window has its own buffer and the microcode walks the windows to work out what to put on each scanline.

Not doubting that, but what is the substantive difference here? Does the fact that there is a screen buffer on the Mac facilitate clipping that is otherwise not possible on the Alto?

It definitely makes it simpler. You can do a per-screen window sort, rather than per-pixel :).

Per-pixel sorting while racing the beam is tricky, game consoles usually did it by limiting the number of objects (sprites) per-line, and fetching+caching them before the line is reached.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#139

Post by [deleted] »

gdubs wrote: post #82
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #72

For anyone (like me) wondering who this guy was, he was a prominent UI guy at Apple back in the day. According to Wikipedia he created the menu bar, QuickDraw, and HyperCard. For whomever submits stories like this, please say who the person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I've heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.

Adding a bit more context: The World Wide Web arguably exists because of HyperCard. The idea that information can be hyperlinked together. Atkinson was a brilliant engineer. As critical to the launch of A Macintosh as anyone — efficient rendering of regions, overlapping windows, etc. And last but not least, Mac Paint. Every computer painting program in existence owes Atkinson a nod.

[deleted]

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#140

Post by justin66 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #72

For anyone (like me) wondering who this guy was, he was a prominent UI guy at Apple back in the day. According to Wikipedia he created the menu bar, QuickDraw, and HyperCard. For whomever submits stories like this, please say who the person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I've heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.

People are showing you respect when they credit you with the ability to Google things yourself.
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