Influential Apple engineer Bill Atkinson dies at 74

A renowned Apple engineer who was instrumental in developing modern-day computing has died. Bill Atkinson, who was part of Apple's original Macintosh development team, died of pancreatic cancer at 74, according to a Facebook post made by his family on June 5.

His contributions to Apple and the Macintosh personal computer are still widely used today, including fundamental UI elements like the menu bar, double-clicking and the selection lasso. However, Atkinson's work goes much deeper than that, since he's partly responsible for the foundational design language that influenced Apple's early days. His legacy includes creating MacPaint, an application that showed the world what a graphics-based system looks like at a time when text-based systems were the norm, and developing QuickDraw, a graphics toolbox that the Macintosh and Lisa computers use. To make computers more user-friendly, Atkinson also designed HyperCard, an Apple application that ...