#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration #noKings

The video from my talk at VCF East 2025, "Making a Hardware Emulator for a Legendary PC Sound Card" is now on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTLAhIkmUl0

hypercard is pretty cool

If you live in the #annarbor area, you should check out the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival this weekend at the Ann Arbor District Library. It's my favorite comics event

https://aadl.org/a2caf

i wish i could convey how jaw dropping this macpaint demo was.

all of this was totally new. outside of small xerox demos to a handful of people, no one had seen anything like it.

all of these little pixel editing tools that seem ho hum today — all of that was brand new.

look at how utterly smooth the mouse worked.

plus the mouse, menus, fonts, icons, windows, buttons, scrolling… all new.
https://qoto.org/@danb/114643833022847879

Today I’m starting a big plot on the @bantamtools ArtFrame Panorama, a monster of a plotter with a 24” x 72” plot area. Excited to see a plot that is as tall as I am!

I’ll be here at the Bantam Tools Machine Arts Gallery in Peekskill NY today. Stop by if you’re in the area. 👋

#PenPlotter

Bill Atkinson: Tim Cook pays tribute to legendary Apple engineer https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/08/bill-atkinson-tim-cook-pays-tribute-to-legendary-apple-engineer/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

RIP, Bill Atkinson

https://512pixels.net/2025/06/rip-bill-atkinson/

Bill Atkinson, Who Made Computers Easier to Use, Is Dead at 74.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Bill Atkinson once gave a talk at AltConf, across from WWDC when it was still in San Francisco.

You could tell he wasn't just smart, he had emotional competency. He built things to help people via computers, but when he was consulting a farmer what Apple II setup he needed, after some consultation told him not to get a computer.

He built PhotoCard, a way to mail postcards from your computer, so you could stay in touch with people. Not a valley tech-bro, but the person they all think they are.

It's difficult to think of two computer programs that had a greater impact on me than MacPaint and HyperCard. They both helped me, a kid that just wanted to draw pictures, realize that computers were unquestionably for me too. Thanks for everything, Bill Atkinson. https://www.wired.com/story/bill-atkinson-apple-engineer-dies/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Bill Atkinson, a pioneering Apple engineer and key member of the original Macintosh team, died on June 5, at age 74 from pancreatic cancer (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/bill-atkinson-rip
http://www.techmeme.com/250607/p16#a250607p16

Just a reminder that the original Myst was developed using HyperCard, one of Bill Atkinson’s many masterpieces.

But I’ll always remember how he thought overlapping windows (or perhaps the smooth movement of windows over each other) was a solveable problem because he recalled seeing that Xerox had solved it (they hadn’t), so he just worked it out because he then thought it could be.

An amazing mind, now lost to us.

RIP Bill, and thank you!

Five years ago, @nomand got
Hypercard running on the Nintendo 3DS. 🫡

https://github.com/TaraHoleInIt/minivmac-3ds

( attn @robotspacer )

#Hypercard was one of the formative influences on my development as a software developer and researcher. I'd done a bunch of programming in various flavors of Basic and C when I first started using it, but Hypercard was the first programming language that I used to solve real problems, ranging from writing up my HS Chemistry Lab reports, to cataloguing my coin collection, to developing a re-enactment of the climactic scene of the Merchant of Venice. I have fond memories of my high school Hypercard programming class (see the movie Hackers for a surprisingly realistic re-enactment), where we got to play with the school's scheduling system, written in hypercard (with fake data though)

RIP #BillAtkinson. Your contributions to our lives will ripple throughout time.

Bill Atkinson was one of the most brilliant, imaginative, and compelling people I ever had the privilege to work with. His vision touched every device you use today. And his heart, his open love and humanity, exceeded all of that.

RIP Bill Atkinson, creator of MacPaint, HyperCard, and lots of fundamental mac graphics stuff

via facebook https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1J715VjcgY/

From Bill Atkinson's Facebook via the Call-A.P.P.L.E. discord:

Dear Friends and Family,
We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by family. We will miss him greatly, and he will be missed by many of you, too. He 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. He is survived by his wife, two daughters, stepson, stepdaughter, two brothers, four sisters, and dog, Poppy.

I’m sure we will hear a lot about Bill Atkinson (RIP) over the next few days, but I want to point out the huge influence of #HyperCard on the Web. @timbl himself mentioned it in his original WWW proposal (https://cybercultural.com/p/1990-programming-the-world-wide-web/), early web browsers like ViolaWWW were modeled on HyperCard (https://cybercultural.com/p/1992-web-vs-gopher/), and even JavaScript owed a debt to it (HyperCard included an object oriented scripting language called HyperTalk; https://cybercultural.com/p/1995-the-birth-of-javascript/).