Bill Atkinson, an engineer who played a key role in the development of the Macintosh and other groundbreaking Apple products, has passed away from pancreatic cancer.
After Atkinson's family died on Facebook, Steven Levy of Wired provided an overview of many of Atkinson's achievements as Apple employee number 51. In addition to the Macintosh, the Apple projects he created or contributed to have contributed to include LISA computers, QuickDraw, The Magic Slate (the iPad precursor), and Hypercards (the World Wide Web precursor).
Atkinson, 74, eventually became passionate about nature photography, writing on Facebook when he was diagnosed with cancer last year, “already had a surprising and wonderful life.”
In an X post, Apple CEO Tim Cook describes Atkinson as “a true visionary whose creativity, mind and groundbreaking work on Mac will inspire us forever. And John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote, “without exaggeration,” and Atkinson “may have been the best computer programmer ever lived.”