A Letter from CEO Matt Brown in memory of Bill Atkinson
The gut-punch news on Saturday of the passing of my dear friend Bill Atkinson has made for a reflective few days for me as I think about him and his impact on me, and his impact on billions of people. The Macintosh computer was released with much anticipation when I was in the middle of a computer science program in college, and it was received by me and my peers with huge enthusiasm. My roommate and close friend Doug and I went to Boston to see its East Coast unveiling and marveled at the amazing creation presented by Steve and his team. Orders were placed, and we waited with anticipation. Inside the case, there were signatures of the Mac team and, of course, MacPaint, QuickDraw, and the MacOS toolbox featured heavily in my fascination and commandeered my time and attention for a while so I could learn how to write programs for this cool new paradigm. Of course, there was the black-and-white dithered icon of Bill in the MacPaint’s AboutBox. Bill and the rest of the Mac team quickly became our heroes, and writing code for the Mac led to a startup my friends and I created that ironically got published by Claris, Apple’s software spinoff, a few years down the road.
It turned out that Bill had a wide and diverse set of interests, even though he was known as a tech god. Bill was super interested in the mind and consciousness. He was a great photographer, but perhaps even better known for his detailed focus on color management, printing, and using software for editing, managing, and printing his beautiful images. Bill was a great teacher, and he wanted to literally give his how-to methods for creating beautiful photos to all the rest of us who were interested, he taught others his methods and creations on many other topics. He loved how his photos led to positive impressions of the natural world. His PhotoCard app, which I got to help him with, allowed friends and families to stay in touch with beautiful (and of course color-accurate) postcards that you could put on your refrigerator with a magnet. Guests entering Bill’s house got to see a wall of his Photocards that he mailed out and received from his many friends. Bill loved to travel, to experience the sunsets and sunrises, the birds and animals in nature, and the ducks in his backyard pond, and I am grateful I got to go on a few of these trips with him. He deeply cared about his family and friends and went out of his way to help them. Bill was a spiritual and devotional human, who deeply cared about not only those he loved and who loved him back – he cared about everyone. I can’t quite remember how I first met Bill, but it was likely through his photography classes that he taught with Charlie Cramer and Mike Chambers at Calypso Imaging.
I’ve been blessed with creativity and community in this life, and I can’t think of a single person with whom I overlapped more in areas of interest than with Bill. Bill was the consummate creative thinker, and it was always fun to spend time with him. He could explain how he coded Quickdraw regions on a 68000 over dinner at a restaurant with a pen and paper tablecloth, he could share his experience of consciousness, we could talk about the ups and downs of our relationships, we could talk about the future, tech, or money and politics, our dogs, and travel plans or really anything because he was so deeply curious and knowledgeable and also so caring. He had a presence and reverence with those he conversed with that was immediately noticeable. I will really miss him as there was no one like him. Thank you, Bill, for all you did for me and for all of humanity.
Matt Brown
