My first meeting Bill was unforgettable with Attockinson. It was from November 1983, and by reporting Rolling Stone, I had access to the Macentosh computer maker team, which was launched early next year. Referring to Mac’s software’s two prominent authors Attockinson and Andy Hertzfield, everyone kept saying to me, “Unless you meet Bill and Andy,” wait. Here’s what I wrote about the Encounter in my book, Extremely Great:
I first met Bill Attockson. Uncutumented hair, a panchau villa mustaches, and a long companion of blue eyes, he acquired the unprecedented intensity of Bruce Drains as a Vietnam weight in one of his turn. Like everyone in the room, he wore jeans and T -shirts. “Do you want to see a bug?” He asked me. He pulled me into his cubic and pointed to his mechanism. Filling the screen was an incredibly detailed drawing of an insect. It was beautiful, something that you can see at an expensive work station in the research lab, but not on a personal computer. Attockson laughed at his jokes, then became very serious, talking closely, talking closely, which gave his words a respectable weight. “The barrier between words and pictures is broken,” he said. “So far the Art of Art has been a sacred club. Well, like China. Now it is for everyday use.”
Attockinson was fine. His partnerships in Macintosh were important for the progress that he had whispered to me in the Apple office that day, known as Bandley 3 that day. A few years later, he will contribute another major partnership with a program called Hypercard, which presented the World Wide Web. Through all this, he maintained his energy and energy de -Vaver, and became an inspiration for all of those who would change the world through the code of conduct. On June 5, 2025, he died after a long illness. He was 74 years old.
Attockson did not intend to be a leader in personal computing. As a graduate student, he studied computer science and neurobology at Washington University. But when he faced an Apple II in 1977, he fell in love, and went to work for the company that built it a year later. He was an employee number 51. In 1979, he was in the small group that led to Steve Jobs guided the Zerox Park Research Lab and looked there through a graphic computer interface. Working on Apple’s Lisa project, translating this future technology into the user became his job. In this process, he invented many conventions that are maintained on today’s computers, such as menu bars. Attocks also developed a ground breaking technology to effectively pull items on the screen. One of these items was a “round racket”-a box with a round corner that becomes part of each computing experience. Attockinson resisted the idea until the jobs saw it around the block and all the symptoms of the traffic corridor and other items.
When the jobs took over the second Apple project, influenced by PARC technology, Macentosh, he defeated Attockinson, whose work had already affected the product. Hertzfeld, who was in charge of the Mac interface, once explained me the features of Lisa, which he allocated for Mac: “Bill Attockson did anything, I took, and nothing.” He said. Attockinson, who was disappointed with Lisa’s high -cost tags, accepted the idea of a more affordable version, and began writing Mac paint, a program that would give users the option to make art on Mac’s butt map screen.
After Mac was launched, the team started eliminating them. Attockinson had the title of Apple Fellow, who gave him the freedom to advance the spirit of passion. He started working on something he calls the magic slate. This device contains a high resolution screen that weighs under a pound and can be controlled by styls and swipes on the touch screen. Basically, he was designing a member 25 years ago. But this technology was not ready to make such a minorized and powerful thing at a cheaper price (Attockson hoped that it would be cheaper that you could afford to lose six in a year and not worry.) “I wanted a magic slate that I could taste it,” he told me once. “
