Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bill Atkinson has died

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 295 posts

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#231

Post by stevenwoo »

genewitch wrote: post #201
stevenwoo wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I was only one of many programmers at Blizzard North + others at Blizzard and our parent company at the time, but you are welcome from me.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#232

Post by scripturial »

ehaliewicz2 wrote: post #138
JKCalhoun wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember coding games for the C64 with an 8 sprite limit, and having to swap sprites in and out for the top and bottom half of the screen to get more than 8.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#233

Post by pmoriarty »

erksa wrote: post #230

Not just a huge influence w/ Apple. Bill Atkinson was a dedicated photographer who did a lot to help bring the idea of sharing memories together. He and his associated printed and sent tons of photography all around the world. The was loved among photographers as well. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photocard-by-bill-atkinson/id3...

More of his photos can be found at https://billatkinson.com/

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#235

Post by fractallyte »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #127
throwanem wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There probably still isn't a good way to get that kind of dynamic range entirely in the digital domain. Oh, I'm sure the shortfall today is smaller, say maybe four or five stops versus probably eight or twelve back then. Nonetheless, I've done enough work in monochrome to recognize an occasional need to work around the same limitations he was, even though very few of my subjects are as demanding.

I wish a good monochrome digital camera didn't cost a small fortune. And I'm too scared to try to remove the Bayer grid from a "color" CCD. Seems that, without the color/Bayer thing, you could get an extra stop or two for low-light. I had a crazy notion to make a camera around an astronomical CCD (often monochrome) but they're not cheap either — at least one with a good pixel count.

I've had the same journey, and opted instead for a Sigma Foveon camera.

Comparisons and advantages: https://www.photigy.com/school/sigma-foveon-sensor-review-dp...

For black and white photography, the best high-end camera seemed to be the Leica M Monochrom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_M_Monochrom), but to my mind, it's trounced by the Foveon:

https://youtu.be/OODMWXX_N7A

https://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2013/01/14/quick-comparison-l...

THIS is the photo that really sold it for me:

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1806915/0&year=2023#...

That's from a modified DP1m, but the SD Quattro H has an easily-removable IR filter and a huge sensor.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#236

Post by beagle3 »

Thanks, Bill. Rest in Peace.

I was amazed by Bill's software seeing it on a Mac back then - MacPaint mostly, then HyperCard. I was not even 10, but I was already programming, and spent hours trying to figure out how to implement MacPaint's Lasso on my humble ZX Spectrum. (With some success, but not quite as elegant...)

If you want to experience HyperCard, John Earnest (RodgerTheGreat on HN[0]) built Decker[1] that runs on both the web and natively, and captures the aesthetic and most stuff perfectly. It uses Lil as a programming language - it is different than HyperTalk, but beautiful in its own right. (It doesn't read as English quite the way HyperTalk does, but it is more regular and easier to write - it's a readable/writable vector language, quite unlike those other ones ...)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RodgerTheGreat

[1] https://beyondloom.com/decker/

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#237

Post by gblargg »

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 key seems to have been recognizing the utility of the region concept and making it fundamental to the QuickDraw API (and the clever representation that made finding the main rectangular portions easy). This insulated QuickDraw from the complexity of windowing system operations. Once you go implementing region operations you probably find that it's fairly efficient to work out the major rectangular regions so you can use normal graphics operations on them, leaving small areas that can just be done inefficiently as a bunch of tiny rectangles. All this work for clipped graphics was applicable to far more than just redrawing obscured window content, so it could justify more engineering time to polishing it. Given how easy they were to use, more things could leverage the optimization (e.g. using them to redraw only the dirty region when a window was uncovered).

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#238

Post by gblargg »

II2II wrote: post #198
giovannibajo1 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a good description, but I'm going to add a couple of details since details that are obvious to someone who lived through that era may not be obvious to those who came after. > Obviously it could have not been a mask of pixels To be more specific about your explanation of too much memory: many early GUIs were 1 bit-per-pixel, so the bitmask would use the same amount of memory as the window contents. There was ano…

And even ignoring memory requirements, an uncompressed bitmap mask would have taken a lot of time to process (especially considering when combining regions where one was not a multiple of 8 pixels shifted with respect to the other. With just the horizontal coordinates of inversions, it takes the same amount of time for a region 8 pixels wide and 800 pixels wide, given the same shape complexity.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#239

Post by ebcode »

nostrademons wrote: post #111
matthewn wrote: post #13

In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not ju…

The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.

IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk when created JavaScript.

Re: Bill Atkinson has died

#240

Post by snickerbockers »

nostrademons wrote: post #111
matthewn wrote: post #13

In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not ju…

The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.

I honestly don't think the modern web is a legitimate hypertext system at this point. It was already bad enough 20 years ago with flash and serverside CGI but now most of the major websites are just serving JavaScript programs that then fetch data using a dedicated API. And then there's all the paywalls and constant CAPTCHA checks to make sure you aren't training an LLM off their content without a license.

Look up hyperland, it's a early 90s documentary by Douglas Adams and the guy from doctor who about the then-future hypermedia revolution. I can remember the web resembling that a long time ago but the modern web is very far removed from anything remotely resembling hypertext.

Post reply on HN