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Bill Atkinson has died

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Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#201

Post by genewitch »

stevenwoo wrote: post #193
alanfalcon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An infamous Starcraft example also contains notes of a similar story where they were so humbled by a competitor's demo (and criticism that their own game was simply "Warcraft in space") that they went back and significantly overhauled their game. Former Ion Storm employees later revealed that Dominion’s E3 1996 demo was pre-rendered, with actors pretending to play, not live gameplay.

I got a look at an early version of StarCraft source code as a reference for the sound library for Diablo 2 and curiosity made me do a quick analysis of the other stuff - they used a very naive approach to C++ and object inheritance to which first time C++ programmers often fall victim. It might have been their first C++ project so they probably needed to start over again anyways. We had an edict on Diablo 2 to make…

Diablo II is in my top 3 games of all time, i still play it all the time. Thanks for contributing so much fun to my life!

(for ref, diablo III is also in my top 3 :)

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#203

Post by duskwuff »

jandrese wrote: post #192
garyrob wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web..." In yet another alternate timeline, someone thought to add something like URLs with something like GET, PUT, etc. to HyperCard, and Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the Web browser never happened because Hypercard already did it all.

On one hand this would be simply amazing, on the other hand it would have been a total security nightmare that makes early Javascript look like a TPM Secure Enclave.

Those who were there will remember:

  on openbackground --merryxmas
    merryxmas "on openbackground --merryxmas"
  end openbackground
(And now I'm curious if this post will trip anyone's antivirus software...)

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#204

Post by zahlman »

analog31 wrote: post #164
jonstewart wrote: post #137

I was just musing to a young team member the other day that I think OOP comes easy to me because I learned HyperCard (v1.2 on System 6 on an SE) at a young age. RIP.

This was my experience too. My mom had a subscription to Byte Magazine, and I remember trying to read the articles on OOP when they came out. It was utterly opaque to me. When I started using HyperCard, the light bulb turned on. I think a subtle factor is that when learning HC (or Visual Basic, or LabVIEW), you started using objects before you learned how to create them. All of these packages came with lots of pre-wr…

>And once again, among casual programmers, relatively few people define their own classes.

I find that I'm less interested in defining my own classes today than I was 10 or so years ago. https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/352/ left a big impression on me (though I didn't see it until a fair bit after the fact).

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#206

Post by deadbabe »

accrual wrote: post #133
jamessinghal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In contrast to some house plants that are meticulously watered and cared for in perfect conditions, and yet they still die in a week.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#207

Post by [deleted] »

btilly wrote: post #134
gdubs wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=y…

[deleted]

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#208

Post by betamaxthetape »

brentjanderson wrote: post #199

Bill's contribution with HyperCard is of course legendary. Apart from the experience of classrooms and computer labs in elementary schools, it was also the primary software powering a fusion of bridge-simulator-meets-live-action-drama field trips (among many other things) for over 20 years at the Space Center in central Utah.[0] I was one of many beneficiaries of this program as a participant, volunteer, and staff me…

Is that stack available anywhere? Or do you have a copy?

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#209

Post by diskzero »

rezmason wrote: post #196
JKCalhoun wrote: post #51

When I was on the ColorSync team at Apple we, the engineers, got an invite to his place-in-the-woods one day. I knew who he was at the time, but for some reason I felt I was more or less beholden to conversing only about color-related issues and how they applied to a computer workflow. Having retired, I have been kicking myself for some time not just chatting with him about ... whatever. He was at the time I met him…

> I have been kicking myself for some time not just chatting with him about ... whatever. Maybe I should show some initiative! See, for a little while now I've wanted to just chat with you about whatever. At this moment I'm working on a little research project about the advent of color on the Macintosh, specifically the color picker. Would you be interested in a casual convo that touches on that? If so, I can create…

John is cool, but I don't think he was around when the Macintosh II software and hardware was being designed for color support. I did work with Eric Ringewald at Be and he was one of the Color Quickdraw engineers. He would be fun to talk to. Michael Dhuey worked on the hardware of the Mac II platform. I guess we can give some credit to Jean-Louis Gassée as well. Try to talk to those people! I got to work with a lot of these Apple legends at General Magic, Be, Eazel and then back at Apple again. I never got to work on a project with JKCalhoun directly, but I did walk by his office quite frequently.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#210

Post by sroussey »

peter303 wrote: post #180
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.

Frame buffer memory was still incredibly expensive in 1980. Our labs 512 x 512 x 8bit table lookup color buffer cost $30,000 in 1980. Mac's 512 x 384 x 8bit buffer in 1984 had to fit the Macs $2500 price. The Xerox Alto was earlier than these two devices and would have cost even more if it had a full frame buffer.

Wasn’t the original Mac at 512 x 342 x 1bit?
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