Tim Cook Honors Bill Atkinson, Visionary Apple Engineer Behind Mac’s Legacy - AppleMagazine

Bill Atkinson, visionary engineer behind the Apple Macintosh operating system, dies at 74

Bill Atkinson, the computer engineer at Apple who played a critical role in the development of the Macintosh operating system in 1984 and the ubiquity of the desktop metaphor of files and folders in personal computing, died on June 5 at the age of 74.

Tim Cook Honors Bill Atkinson, Visionary Apple Engineer Behind Mac’s Legacy - AppleMagazine

Bill Atkinson, Apple’s employee number 51, joined the company in 1978 after being recruited by Steve Jobs from the University of Washington, where he was studying neurochemistry. His work on the Lisa and Macintosh computers revolutionized user interfaces. Atkinson created QuickDraw, a graphics library that enabled the Macintosh’s groundbreaking visual interface, replacing text-based commands with windows and icons. He also developed MacPaint, a …