“Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware.”
Bill Atkinson wrote QuickDraw and MacPaint and created HyperCard. His dithering algorithm still ships on hardware today. He made a 1984 computer draw like nothing else could. Pancreatic cancer, 74.