Bill Atkinson (1951-2025)

Original text from The Complete HyperCard Handbook (Expanded 2nd Edition with HyperCard 1.2 supplement!!!)

Open HyperCard Stacks with just 512K RAM via HyperDA.

If copying HyperCard was such an obvious idea, where did all the AmigaVision productions go? What happened to all the Asymmetrix Toolbook-ware?

David Greelish “Before Macintosh” interviews with Bill Atkinson: Parts 1, 2, 3

Make beautiful Atkinson-dithered images with HyperDither, GraphicConverter (Effects => Dithering => Atkinson) or in your browser with DitherIt! More than you could ever possibly want to read about dithering and an undergrad lecture on Floyd-Steinberg dithering.

Bill Atkinson’s Rolodex, a.k.a. Casady & Greene QuickDEX (v1.4, II).

Bill Atkinson’s 10 Rules for Making Interfaces More Human

Quotes from:

• Bill Atkinson Presents HyperCard at the Apple Corps of Dallas (1987)
• Legacy of HyperCard Event (2017)
• HyperCard Training Solutions (1987)
• Bill Atkinson on PhotoCard and HyperCard at the Eyeo Conference (2013)
• Bill and Andy Hertzfeld demonstrating oldmac stuff at the Computer History Museum (2010)
• David Pogue hosts “The Macintosh at 20” (2004)
• Triangulation Interview with Bill Atkinson, 2016 (part 1, 2)
• Triangulation Interview with Atkinson, 2018 (part 1, 2)
• CHM - Bill Atkinson on how Apple obviously doesn’t do user testing anymore (2022)
• CHM - The Macintosh at 40
• Churchill Club - Steve Jobs’ Legacy (2011)
• Asymmetrix Toolbook Demo - Computer Chronicles on Windows 3.0 (1990)
• Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age - “People don’t read encyclopedias cover to cover. It just doesn’t happen! But …”
• Designing Interactions interviews: Bill Atkinson
• Unused 1984 Macintosh commercials: “I think of myself as a cross between an artist and an inventor”

R.I.P. uliwitness, a.k.a. Uli Kusterer, longtime Macintosh programmer and HyperCard enthusiast. We will miss you too.

Fun fact: I recognized Uli’s name when it popped up in the podcast Discord. Back in the late 1990s a friend and I used “Uli’s Panes” as the playlist interface for a classic MacOS MOD player. Remember Uli, HyperCard and Bill with:

• Myst Reverse Engineering
• Write Your Own XCMD with CodeWarrior
• Other HyperCard streams
• hypercard.org
• Stacksmith
• Classic MacOS programming streams
• “Why programming sucks and how to make it better” (SwiftConf 2015) with references to what made HyperCard a uniquely intuitive development environment. Get a load of Uli’s HyperCard stack icon shirt!
• Partial HyperCard stack file format documentation

Uli’s Moose, an updated version of The Talking Moose for classic MacOS. Uli told me he tried to submit a new version of Mac OS X to the App Store but it was rejected several times and he eventually gave up. Thanks, Apple!