Bill Atkinson is one of the members of the original Mac development team. He created MacPaint, the QuickDraw toolbox (the underpinnings of the Mac’s graphical interface), and HyperCard, just to name a few of his many accomplishments.
This is a great interview, with lots of nice little touches, like Leo LaPorte pulling out his original copies of Inside Macintosh, the bible for us Mac developers.
[Via iHeartApple2]
The original Mac team was just a group of incredible people.
The whole interview was just amazing (I watched live). One of the best tech interviews I’ve seen in a long time in fact, almost three hours in total!
Part one is on TWiT now, and the other half should be up in a few weeks at twit.tv/tri
I still have my hardbound Inside Mac 1-3. I sometimes bring it with me to teach. “Back in the old days, this was pretty much everything you needed to know to program one of these beasties. A nice object lesson on how much more complex (and capable) today’s systems are.
Bill was also the main creator of the mouse on the first Mac. I met him here where I work when he had an exhibit of his photos (that still hanging in the hall outside my department). I also first got to know my fiancé in line waiting for him to sign his book “Within the Stone.”
Can it be? A Laporte show that isn’t a full hour of whiny gossip? Looking forward to seeing this.
This interview is pure gold, and I hope more of these pioneers in tech are given the audience they deserve. They have so much wisdom to offer young developers, and so-called experts at the biggest companies in the industry. Not only was it nostalgic, but incredibly informative, to hear how early development problems were overcome, and what the early thinking was at Apple. Like I said – pure gold.