
Bill Atkinson: Reflections on the 40th anniversary of my joining Apple - kick
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Joining_Apple_Computer
======
dep_b
A had a bit of a chuckle watching this video mentioned elsewhere in the
comments:
[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=25053106-2187-4cde-9981-a9eb002aa4e8)

So around 5:10 he starts to explain why the soft keys they thought to use were
such a bad idea, because they would relabel with changing contexts but the
user never would read the label again.

That's basically one of the major problems with the TouchBar.

~~~
mistersquid
> So around 5:10 he starts to explain why the soft keys they thought to use
> were such a bad idea, because they would relabel with changing contexts but
> the user never would read the label again. > That's basically one of the
> major problems with the TouchBar.

The soft keys Atkinson describes are quite a bit different than the UI of the
Touch Bar.

For many softwares, Touch Bar elements change shape, size, and color as well
as text.

For example, in QuickTime Player opening a video shows a play button, a
timeline/scrubber, and panel for brightness, volume, and Siri. Tapping the
brightness button hides all the other elements and expands the brightness
button into a slider with a dismissal "x". Tapping the "x" restores the
controls to their original state. There is little (no) possibility of touching
a button whose text label has changed in this case.

Other apps, like Mail, which do have changing text labels are dynamic enough
that most (?) users would not be likely to tap a button by mistake due to a
changing label.

In summary, Touch Bar elements are much more varied than what Atkinson
describes with the Lisa prototype. The two don't present comparable usability
models, so criticizing the Touch Bar based on how soft keys worked on the Lisa
prototype doesn't really make sense.

~~~
dep_b
The problem with putting keys on the keyboard that radically change depending
on context is that you cannot use them from memory just like the other keys.
Of course CMD+C doesn't copy when you didn't select anything nor will CMD+W
close a tab in a tabless application but when I want to lower the volume on a
TouchBarless Mac it's always the same key in the same place while it might
exist or not exist depending on the application I'm in.

Perhaps in Final Cut Pro I'm not able to lower the volume anymore because
there's a video scrubber in the place of that key instead. So I cannot depend
on that key anymore.

~~~
mistersquid
> The problem with putting keys on the keyboard that radically change
> depending on context is that you cannot use them from memory just like the
> other keys.

Yes, this is one of the tradeoffs the Touch Bar makes in order to have a
dynamically changing touch interface. I wouldn't really call it a "problem",
though many do in light of the Touch Bar taking the space of function keys.

I do miss the function keys, but I also sort of like the Touch Bar in certain
circumstances.

Anecdotally, I was pretty fed up with my 2017 MacBook Pro (butterfly keyboard)
and so made the change to the 16-inch. Apparently, I've gotten so used to the
soft "Esc" key that I frequently rest my finger on the 16-inch's physical
"Esc" key for a few monents before realizing I actually have to push down to
activate it.

~~~
dep_b
The touchbar should been an extension at bottom of the screen where you would
always be able to see it’s state, not of the keyboard.

------
decasteve
So many articles come along discussing his work without actually mentioning
his name. I think Bill is one of those contributors to technology that are
often underestimated.

Anecdote: Steve Jobs came up to him standing in line to buy the original
iPhone and said to him, “Bill, I already sent you one!” Bill responded, “But I
need three more!”

~~~
ksec
>Steve Jobs came up to him standing in line to buy the original iPhone and
said to him, “Bill, I already sent you one!” Bill responded, “But I need three
more!”

I LOLed, Any Source on that? Great Story.

~~~
decasteve
It was in an interview Bill gave a few years back. That story stuck out in my
mind but I don’t remember the interviewer.

------
musicale
> Apple published HyperCard in 1987, six years before Mosaic, the first web
> browser

Mosaic was the first Mac and Windows web browser (1992-93) but the first
UNIX/NeXT web browser was WWW, 1990-91.

Bill Atkinson (and HyperCard) are awesome though. Imagine a networked
HyperCard ushering in the web in 1987; or Intermedia for that matter in 1985;
or much earlier in the 20th century a la Vannevar Bush (1930s) or Ted Nelson
(1960s); or if Netscape had focused on Gopher, WAIS, FTP, and/or NNTP and
dropped HTTP as being superfluous.

~~~
mamp
I used and programmed HyperCard quite a bit back in the day (even C extensions
into HyperCard!). The jump from HyperCard to web is bigger than it appears
from the UI:

\- to make HC work on the hardware at the time it had quite a lot of optimised
MC68000 assembly so it wasn't very extensible which was why it didn't take off
like visual basic i.e. you could build stacks but not really apps

\- there was no declarative format, stacks were binary files

\- It didn't support networking at all as far as I can remember

\- Networking at Apple based on AppleTalk so their thinking was very much in
the local network, in fact their TCP/IP extension (not built into the OS at
the time) was not very well supported.

HyperCard was great, but it was never designed with a browser model in mind,
mainly sharing binary stacks between people.

~~~
paulrpotts
All very true - I also wrote XCMD/XFCN plug-ins back in the day, and my first
published technical articles, in MacTutor and Washington Apple Pi magazine,
were about how to do that.

HyperCard had more innovations that I miss. One of them was the ability to
paint on the card background and foreground layers separately. This meant that
you could cover black pixels in the background with white pixels in the
foreground.

The HyperTalk language was kind of an oddball, quirky mess; it was designed to
closely resemble English, but this actually tended to make it harder to come
up with just the right syntax to do what you wanted. But that object-oriented
model was carried over into AppleScript, and the whole scripting model for
writing scriptable applications. It was not exactly easy to write code that
would follow the OSA scripting model, but applications that supported it could
be "puppeted" to do some amazing stuff. For example, I wrote a C++ program in
PowerPlant which would "puppet" Quark XPress to generate customized
newsletters.

Atkinson deserves a lot of credit for making a 68000 do things people could
barely believe could be done without custom graphics hardware, and his whole
region model (described in a patent) is amazing. And you can now browse the
source code for MacPaint and QuickDraw:
[https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-
sour...](https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/)

It's not really legible if you don't have some expertise in 68000 assembly
language, but even if you don't, it's still a model of clarity and an
inspiration.

~~~
jandrese
Hypertalk (the language of HyperCard) had a lot of syntactic sugar, but was
pretty easy to get started with even with almost no programming background.

For example, a very simple button might have a script that looks like:

    
    
      on mouseUp
        ask "What is your name?"
        put it into card field "Name"
      end mouseUp
    

You could get pretty far by reading scripts and trying things out in
Hypercard.

I also tend to think that the idea of network aware Hypercard sounds super
cool, but would have been a security nightmare. Hypercard wasn't written in an
era of adversarial coding, it would have been knocked over 10 different ways
every day by hackers. Code and content were heavily mixed together and there
was no permission model beyond preventing people from editing your stacks by
accident. Every stack or even card you loaded would be downloading and
executing code.

~~~
paulrpotts
>You could get pretty far by reading scripts and trying things out in
Hypercard.

I think that's true - but my experience was that it was a good language for
beginners, but didn't "scale" well as you started working on more complex
programs. The English-like syntax could get in the way as soon as you started
to assemble more complex expressions, and you'd be left hunting for the right
syntax as if you were playing an old Infocom game. It gave the impression that
the parser was more accommodating and sophisticated than it really was, when
really it had a rigid syntax like most other programming languages. And
because most of the documentation was aimed at beginners, it was hard to find
clear answers about _exactly_ what the syntax had to look like when assembling
those more complex expressions. It has been a long time since I was writing
HyperTalk, but I remember being very frustrated that I couldn't find a formal
language spec (in BNF or a bubble diagram or something) the way I could for
languages like Pascal.

Still, it really should get a lot of credit for encouraging a lot of beginners
to write code and build quite sophisticated little databases complete with all
kinds of animations and visual effects that would have been monstrously
difficult to code from scratch in C or Pascal. I should also remember that as
a programmer and Computer Science student, _I was not the real target
audience_ for the language design.

------
machinecoffee
On a slightly related note, I have to say I love the whole folklore website.
It adds a really human face to the fascinating developments in IT at that
time, and a lot of that I think comes from Andy Hertzfeld who tells a story
really well.

------
spectramax
> Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard
> authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive
> media.

I want to do this badly. Has anyone taken LSD here on HN? What can you share
about this, almost sounds like an urban myth, claim that one can have
revolutionary ideas, profound realizations that otherwise cannot be had?

~~~
superdisk
> I want to do this badly.

My advice is to stay far far away from psychedelics. I took LSD a few months
ago after hearing about what great insights it can enable, or the euphoria it
lets you feel.

I ended up having a bad, panic-inducing trip which caused something in my
brain to flip and start having panic attacks and dissociation. The
dissociation/depersonalization faded after a couple weeks (although those
weeks were hell) but the anxiety and general feeling of weirdness still affect
me.

I don't really feel like I've ever gotten back to how I've been before I took
the drug. As some other commenter on HN said, "it's like throwing a wrench in
your neurological cogwheels." The rewards definitely don't outweigh the risks.

~~~
texasbigdata
Really sorry to hear that. Did you ever experience anything related (like
mushrooms)?

~~~
francescopnpn
Remember that his experience is just an anecdote. You should not base your
reasoning upon someone else's experience. You should research and keep in mind
that yes, bad trips exist and also that we're talking about banned compounds
and as such their purity varies. God knows what he took. The only way to know
for sure is to order from a (legal) EU lab, which makes a similar compound or
something. With that said, my personal opinion is that it doesn't make sense
to take something under researched, artificially isolated. As such, imo,
you're better off growing your spores, again, ordered from and consumed in a
legal place, such as, Holland. There was a thread about them both those things
here on HN, with some great comments. You might wanna use HN search and sift
thru the comments. But as far as spores, I think it's pretty accurate to say
that what you'll experience is a dissociation from your ego, which, is a
totally abstract concept, and quite unimaginable. Mhh, I'd say what happens is
you see everything from the outside, you realize everything is a mental
construction and feel like everything is connected. I recommend reading a
piece on Santa Claus and the spores. Gives much more context than anything for
what their use should be, and was, imo. Don't expect to turn an apple into a
Macintosh.

------
hcs
> Some say Steve used me, but I say he harnessed and motivated me, and drew
> out my best creative energy.

Oh, to be so used.

------
slavapestov
The source code to MacPaint and QuickDraw:
[https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-
sour...](https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-
code/?key=macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code)

~~~
kick
Amazing find! Thanks for sharing!

------
acqq
The article was written and published in 2018 and needs (2018) in the title
here on HN.

Also the date in the article header "1979" is a typo, as the ID on the picture
proves. That one should refer to 1978, but of course can't be changed here.

~~~
kick
Oh, wow, nice eye! I was mistaken thinking 1979+40=2019 when it was actually
1978+40=2018. Can't edit it now, though, sorry.

------
jonstewart
I credit HyperCard with slyly teaching me many of the principles of OOP when I
was a kid. Thank you, Bill.

------
DonHopkins
I recently posted these thoughts about Bill Atkinson, and links to articles
and a recent interview he gave to Brad Myers' user interface class at CMU:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726302)

Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy --
practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different
drugs. The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to
Leo Laporte.

"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD,
and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home
in Los Gatos, California." ...

[https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-
hyp...](https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/)

Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:

[https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...](https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=false)

Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction
Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:

[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=25053106-2187-4cde-9981-a9eb002aa4e8)

Including polaroids of early Lisa development.

About PhotoCard:

[http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html](http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html)

PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store,
that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your
own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad,
iPhone or iPod touch.

Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has
created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send
postcards.

With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad,
iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US
Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard,
select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then,
flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your
PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card,
it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation,
send it off to any email or postal address in the world!

~~~
pvg
Was this bit about LSD and Hypercard covered before what seems like a 2016
interview and some later articles? So much has been written about HyperCard
(and MacPaint and QuickDraw) I'm wondering if I somehow managed to miss it in
all that material.

~~~
DonHopkins
As far as I know, the first time Bill Atkinson publically mentioned that LSD
inspired HyperCard was in an interview with Leo Laporte on Apr 25th 2016,
which claims to be "Part 2". I have searched all over for part 1 but have not
been able to find it.

Then Mondo 2000 published a transcript of that part of the interview on June
18 2018, and I think a few other publications repeated it around that time.

And later on Feb 4, 2019 he gave a live talk to Brad Myers' "05-640:
Interaction Techniques" user interface design class at CMU, during which he
read the transcript.

[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/schedule....](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/schedule.html)

It's well worth watching that interview. He went over and explained all of his
amazing Polaroids of Lisa development, which I don't think have ever been
published anywhere else.

See Bill Atkinson's Lisa development polaroids:

[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill_Atki...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill_Atkinson_Photos/)

Then at 1:03:15 a student asked him the million dollar question: what was the
impetus and motivation behind HyperCard? He chuckled, reached for the
transcript he had off-camera, and then out of the blue he asked the entire
class "How many of you guys have done ... a psychedelic?" (Brad reported "No
hands", but I think some may have been embarrassed to admit it in front of
their professor). So then Bill launched into reading the transcript of the LSD
HyperCard story, and blew all the students' minds.

See video of Bill's talk:

[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=25053106-2187-4cde-9981-a9eb002aa4e8)

The next week I gave a talk to the same class that Bill had just traumatized
by asking if they'd done illegal drugs, and (at 37:11) I trolled them by
conspiratorially asking: "One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you
ever used ... (pregnant pause) ... HyperCard? Basically, because in 1987 I saw
HyperCard, and it fucking blew my mind." Then I launched into my description
of how important and amazing HyperCard was.

See video of Don's talk:

[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=f0600d9d-282e-4b83-a6f4-a9f2003ad407)

Here is an index of all of the videos from Brad Myers' interaction techniques
class, including Rob Haitani (Palm Pilot), Shumin Zhai (text input and swipe
method), Dan Bricklin (spreadsheets, Demo prototyping tool), Don Hopkins (pie
menus), and Bill Atkinson (Mac, HyperCard):

[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%2250285cc6-431b-4b7e-af35-a9eb00287eec%22)

------
davebryand
I’d love to understand how much of a role psychedelics in the creation of
Apple’s story arc. Does anyone have information about where this has been
discussed? Thanks!

~~~
mistrial9
It might be useful to understand early Apple Inc -- as an Apple II company,
then secondly as a Macintosh company. The former was very 'California' with
health and folksy undertones, but later came money-at-a-large-scale and waves
of corporate hires that enabled the corporate side. So you have the California
folksy (plus yes, psychedelics/art/education core) base in Phase I, adding
large, expensive structure and people who were professionals at doing that, in
Phase II. The fuels of market success add to the constant growth, yet the
California core is still in the fabric of the culture -- that was the
Macintosh era. In Phase II, 'creatives' now have modern cubicles to work with
computers -- HyperCard, typography and desktop publishing, awareness of the
media business (LA) and some interaction with LA, but definitely print itself,
worldwide. The printed word had a significance that is hard to explain if you
only know a post-Internet world. So Apple was in education, print, media, and
also (they thought) business.

You might ask similarly, what was the role of psychedelics in Hollywood? of
course it was there, but to be a business, you had the business people, who
were not-at-all about expanded consciousness, but competitive and
territorially aggressive, ego-driven, etc. Same but different at corporate
Phase II Apple. By the time of the Macintosh, a feeling of Big Corporation was
in the air already, and the tie-dye was not often worn on the outside. Steve
must have taken psychedelics, but was way too arrogant, aggressive and lets
say it, dangerous (he was at NeXT in Fremont by then). Steve personally traded
tie-dye for scary and intimidating black luxury cars early on. So how do you
categorize that ?

~~~
davebryand
Jobs did speak up about his LSD use at some points, but I think he probably
transcended that and followed the practices outlined in one of his favorite
books: "Autobiography of a Yogi", which I'd highly recommend to anyone
interested in consciousness.

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my
life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t
remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what
was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things
back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I
could.” Steve Jobs

~~~
mistrial9
In actual practice, Steve Jobs had a lot more in common with Napolean
Bonaparte than Aurobindo Ghose IMO.

edit -- Aurobindo and Paramahansa Yogananda were both Bengali, but different
teachings..

~~~
Spooky23
That's a great comparison that I never thought of! Thanks!

------
cpr
Fun side note:

Our Xdata data publishing plugin for QuarkXPress uses HyperTalk as its
scripting language, since we shipped it first 30 years ago.

Still shipping, though XPress is dying...

~~~
cpr
Though our equivalent plugin for InDesign is still going strong after 20
years...

------
thomasfl
HyperCard was a great idea. In 1989 Bill Appleton released SuperCard.
SuperCard had support for networking and better support for colors. I wrote an
email client for it. If SuperCard only had been able to download supercard
code from the net, it could have become what the web is today.

------
ksec
Why did Apple dropped Pascal and went with Objective-C instead?

Market Pressure?

~~~
mikelevins
It went with Objective-C because of Nextstep. Apple bought NeXT because NeXT
had a real operating system and Apple didn't. Apple had burned a few years and
a hundred million dollars or so trying to build a proper operating system, and
they weren't very happy with what they had to show for it. So they bought
NeXT.

The application layer of Nextstep was written in Objective-C. So Objective-C
became Apple's new application-programming language.

By the time of the NeXT acquisition, Pascal was already out of fashion.
Apple's officially-blessed application framework, MacApp, was originally
written in Object Pascal, but Pascal wasn't particularly popular with
programmers inside or outside of Apple. People liked C better, and most of
them used it whenever they could.

When it came time to plan for development of MacApp 3.0, the development team
was hearing a lot of complaints about Pascal and hopeful wishes about C. I
remember a meeting where Steve Friedrich, the lead developer on MacApp, wrote
down all the options he could think of on a whiteboard and crossed them off
one-by-one. All the objections boiled down to what programmers inside and
outside Apple would put up with. The last thing left on the list was C++, so
MacApp 3.0 was written in C++.

Only a handful of programming-language nerds complained about the change.
Ironically, one of the complainers was Steve himself. He was a Smalltalk guy,
but he was there to give Mac developers what they wanted, not to push his
linguistic preferences.

