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Bill Atkinson has died

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Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#211

Post by sneak »

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 to say that I mused at the time about a wealthy, retired, engineer who throws money at high end photo gear and suddenly thinks they're a photographer.

Duchamp would like a word.

Seriously though, as someone this describes to a T (though “suddenly” in this case is about 19 years), I was afraid to call myself any sort of artist for well over a decade, thinking I was just acquiring signal with high end gear. I didn’t want to try to present myself as something I’m not. After all, I just push the button, the camera does all the work.

I now have come to realize that this attitude is toxic and unnecessary. Art (even bad art!) doesn’t need more gatekeeping or gatekeepers.

I am a visual artist. A visual artist with perhaps better equipment than my skill level or talent justifies, but a visual artist nonetheless.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#212

Post by mkl »

sroussey wrote: post #210
peter303 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes: https://512pixels.net/2025/05/original-macintosh-resolution/

There was a discussion here a couple of weeks ago (with a typo in the title): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44110219

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#213

Post by worik »

90s_dev wrote: post #8
LorenDB wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lines of code story is a timeless classic.

> He thought and wrote "-2000 lines". Management stopped asking Bill to fill out the form. This lesson stuck with me for years. Final results alone are measurable, not productivity.

Imagine being the manager that had to assess Bill Atkinson's productivity!

> Final results alone are measurable

Not even those, for individuals

Mostly we work in teams. I myself like to work in "plumbing" that is arbitrarily far from "final results"

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#214

Post by koops »

Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld were my childhood heroes through their work. Inside Macintosh was a series that enlightened my teen years. Thanks, Bill.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#215

Post by duskwuff »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #154
pducks32 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There were far fewer abstraction layers than today. Today when your desktop application draws something, it gets drawn into a context (a "buffer") which holds the picture of the whole window. Then the window manager / compositor simply paints all the windows on the screen, one on top of the other, in the correct priority (I'm simplifying a lot, but just to get the idea). So when you are programing your application, y…

> But how was the region implemented?

The source code describes it as "an unpacked array of sorted inversion points". If you can read 68k assembly, here's the implementation of PtInRgn:

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

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#217

Post by rezmason »

diskzero wrote: post #209
rezmason wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> I never got to work on a project with JKCalhoun directly, but I did walk by his office quite frequently.

Did you ever get hit with a paper airplane as you did? ;)

Thanks for this reply, and if you're who I think you are, thank you for all the good work you did alongside these other folks :D

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#218

Post by WillAdams »

Uvix wrote: post #129
sgt wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HyperCard also inspired Myst (the game), if I recall correctly

The initial (Mac-only) version of Myst was built in HyperCard.

And it was preceded by _The Manhole_ which was billed as "Where Alice would have gone if she had Hypercard".

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#219

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

We can certainly chat.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#220

Post by JKCalhoun »

diskzero wrote: post #209
rezmason wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

True. I showed up at Apple in '95 after Color Quickdraw was already a thing.

Hilariously though, I did get handed the color pickers to "port" to PowerPC. In fact one of the first times I thought I was in over my head being at Apple was when I was staring at 68030 assembly and thinking, "Fuck, I have to rewrite this in C perhaps."

From your username, I feel like we've chatted before (but I don't know your real name).

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