On Sunday, tech giant Apple CEO Tim Cook paid tributes to Bill Atkinson — the creator of Macintosh QuickDraw and HyperCard in the team of late Apple Co-founder Steve Jobs — who passed away at age 74.
His family posted the news on Facebook, saying that he passed away at home in Portola Valley in the US. Atkinson is survived by his wife, two daughters, stepson, stepdaughter, two brothers, four sisters, and his dog, Poppy, according to a message the family posted on Facebook.
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Bill Atkinson. He was a true visionary whose creativity, heart, and groundbreaking work on the Mac will forever inspire us. Our thoughts are with his loved ones,” Cook posted on X social media platform.
Atkinson was a pioneering Apple engineer, joining in 1978 and leaving in 1990. He was ‘Apple Employee No. 51’, recruited by Jobs. Atkinson was one of the 30 team members to develop the first Macintosh, but was also principal designer of Lisa’s graphical user interface (GUI), a novelty in computers at the time.
He created QuickDraw, enabling the Macintosh’s graphical user interface, and invented the menu bar, double-click, and selection lasso.
He also developed MacPaint and HyperCard, making computers user-friendly.
After Apple, he co-founded General Magic, which aimed to create early smartphones but failed on a commercial basis. He later joined an early “computer intelligence” company called Numenta in 2007.
His family said in the Facebook post that Atkinson was “a remarkable person, and the world will be forever different because he lived in it. He was fascinated by consciousness, and as he has passed on to a different level of consciousness, we wish him a journey as meaningful as the one it has been to have him in our lives.”
