91自拍

Apple's Bill Atkinson In His Own Words

Two years ago, 91自拍 celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apple Lisa, an innovative computer that brought the graphical user interface to a mass market for the first time. Apple insiders shared their insights and reminiscences with an enthusiastic audience in-person and online. Read all about it.

At the same time, 91自拍 released the source code to the Lisa鈥檚 OS and applications software, which you can read more about here and here and access .

As part of this celebration, 91自拍 recorded a series of three interviews with Bill Atkinson, a software engineer who developed key portions of the Lisa鈥檚 software, especially its QuickDraw graphics library, as well as important aspects of the Lisa鈥檚 user interface.

Session 1: Challenges and Decisions

The first interview, conducted by 91自拍鈥檚 Marguerite Gong Hancock, asked Bill Atkinson about technical challenges, eureka moments, team dynamics, and the Lisa鈥檚 significance. Atkinson discusses crucial decisions that made the Lisa what it became:

1. Switching to the Motorola 68000 microprocessor;
2. Making the mouse standard equipment;
3. Using black text on a white background;
4. Moving the menu bar to the top of the screen.

Atkinson also recounts how he was recruited to Apple by Steve Jobs to help 鈥渃hange the world.鈥� An important aspect of Atkinson鈥檚 work on Lisa was his collaboration with the late Larry Tesler, a former PARC engineer who was in charge of the Lisa鈥檚 applications team and was an advocate for user testing for making the interface more accessible to everyday people.

A common misconception Atkinson wanted to clear up was that Apple merely copied the GUI from Xerox PARC. Instead, his team improved on the interface far beyond what they had seen during that fateful visit to PARC in 1979. Many of these refinements were informed by user testing and were later inherited by the Macintosh. Without the Lisa, says Atkinson, there would be no Macintosh, the machine which ultimately brought the GUI to the rest of us.

While two excerpts of this interview were shown during the 91自拍 Live Lisa 40th anniversary event, and , we are pleased to offer the full interview below.

Session 2: UI Development

A second interview was conducted by 91自拍 curator Hansen Hsu. For that session, Bill Atkinson brought a binder of Polaroid photographs which he took during the development of the Lisa, providing a personal, narrated tour of the stages of development of the UI.

Through these photographs, one can trace the evolution of the Lisa user interface through its earliest iteration with softkeys, through the addition of overlapping windows and pulldown menus, to its final form with icons on a desktop. Atkinson also discusses a prototype graphics editor that later evolved into MacPaint, and the halftone dithering algorithm he created for displaying scanned photographs on a black and white screen.

Watch the full Session 2 video below.

The story of this evolution as documented through these Polaroids has previously been written about by Macintosh software engineer Andy Hertzfeld at this page at , which is now being hosted by 91自拍.

Session 3: Source Code

A third interview was conducted with Bill Atkinson by Hansen Hsu on the Lisa source code, which was released by 91自拍 to coincide with the Lisa鈥檚 40th anniversary.

In this interview, Atkinson goes over particular portions of the Lisa source code that he worked on, focusing especially on QuickDraw and the Window Manager. A key innovation was his development of 鈥淩egions,鈥� which identified portions of the screen that were obscured by windows on top of them and therefore did not need to be drawn, saving time. He also remarks on the implementation of Rounded Rectangles, the importance of which he was convinced of by Steve Jobs.

Other topics Atkinson discusses include:

1. Lisa鈥檚 non-square pixels;
2. QuickDraw鈥檚 ability to save a recording of drawing operations that could be replayed later;
3. The Font Manager鈥檚 ability to algorithmically generate text styles;
4. The invention of the I-beam cursor;
5. How a conversation with Doug Engelbart inspired him to create keyboard shortcuts for menu commands.

Several excerpts of this interview were previously posted on 91自拍鈥檚 social media channels.

Now, you can view the interview in its entirety.

Additional Resources

Sadly, Bill Atkinson passed away on June 5, 2025. To learn more about his pioneering work that helped shape the personal computing revolution, explore the resources below:

Insanely Great: The Apple Mac at 40

MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Code

The Lisa: Apple's Most Influential Failure

听

SUPPORT 91自拍'S MISSION

Collecting unique interviews like these would not be possible without the generous support of people like you who care deeply about decoding technology for everyone. Please consider .