Bill Atkinson was someone I had never met. But he changed my life.
I learned of Bill’s passing a couple of days ago. It was not that I had thought about Bill a lot but the news of his death brought back memories and a recognition of the critical role he had played in my life and career. Bill Atkinson’s vision and work fundamentally altered the trajectory of my career, my understanding of what technology could be, and ultimately, who I became as an educator and researcher.
Bill Atkinson, a self described “artist and inventor,” was one of the original programmers for the Macintosh computer. He is famous for inventing some of the fundamental elements of graphical interfaces we now take for granted—such as pull-down menus and the double-click gesture. MacPaint, another of his creations, allowed ordinary users to draw and manipulate images pixel by pixel using a tool palette of brushes and pencils (another of his innovations).
But more than anything else, it was one of his personal passion projects that influenced me greatly. That product was HyperCard.
To understand why HyperCard was so important to me we have to go back to 1988. I was a recent graduate from engineering moving into design school. I was carrying the weight of what felt like four years of academic failure (something I have written about here and talked about here).
I came to the Industrial Design Center (IDC) to get my masters in visual communications with the goal of making educational film. I had been inspired by people like Carl Sagan (Cosmos) and Jacob Bronowski (Ascent of Man) and wanted to follow in their footsteps, I believed that my scattered interests—science and math, poetry and cinema, art and literature—could maybe come together in creating powerful cinematic learning experiences. That would be my future.
Computers, not so much.
It is not that I had not worked with computers. I had learned to code using punch cards, something I truly did not enjoy. And then came coding in Pascal on an IBM PC clone. None of it was fun. The PC felt like a workhorse when I was seeking poetry. I could see no easy way to convert the visions I had in my head into anything beautiful and tangible.
At IDC, however, I came face to face with a new kind of computer—the Macintosh. With its easy to use interface, its deep integration of graphics and type, it was a magical machine.
And on every Macintosh computer was this program called HyperCard.
HyperCard, with its simple HyperTalk language, its ability to create graphics and interactivity, intrigued me. But more than that, it gave me a way to code that felt natural to how I thought.
Years later, I would read Sherry Turkle’s work on computational thinking and her distinction between two fundamentally different approaches to programming. In “The Second Self” and later writings, Turkle described the formal planners versus the bricoleurs. The formal planners, like Donald Knuth, approached programming with mathematical precision, starting with clear specifications and building systematic, elegant solutions. They wrote no code till the entire system had been mapped out. The bricoleurs, on the other hand, jumped into writing snippets of code, working more intuitively, through exploration and negotiation with the materials, letting the solution emerge through a process of tinkering and discovery.
I was unmistakably a bricoleur (though I didn’t really know either the word or the idea at that time), and HyperCard was designed for people like me. What I discovered later was that Bill Atkinson himself was a bricoleur. He didn’t start with grand architectural plans—he coded through probes and explorations, letting the overall project emerge organically. And despite this seeming scattershot approach, people who saw his code as being beautiful, and compared its architecture and design as akin “looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.”
This philosophy and approach to coding was embedded in the very DNA of HyperCard and HyperTalk, which invited experimentation, welcoming incremental building, and making it easy to try ideas without the fear of breaking everything.
If the Macintosh was a computer “for the rest of us”—HyperCard was the programming environment “for the rest of us.”
It would be an understatement to say that this approach resonated with me deeply—it felt like coming home to a way of thinking I didn’t even know I had.
What I didn’t know then, but came to understand later, was the vision that drove Bill Atkinson to create HyperCard. In his own words, as told to Leo Laporte, Bill described a moment of cosmic inspiration—gazing up at billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, and recognizing that consciousness was blossoming throughout the universe.
But it was his earthbound metaphor that captured the essence of what HyperCard was meant to solve. Looking down at street lamps, each casting pools of light separated by darkness, Bill saw the isolated nature of human knowledge. “Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections,” he said.
His solution? A “trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom.” HyperCard was designed to encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, hoping that more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop.
This wasn’t just software—it was a philosophy made manifest in code.
I was of course unaware of all of this, back in 1988, as I first began playing with Hypercard.
What I do know is that, suddenly all these different things I had been interested in—science, technology, art, literature, poetry, film—came together, effortlessly, in a way that I had never thought possible. This new tool, with a dash of creativity and design thrown in, could create transformative new opportunities for learning. HyperCard brought my analytic and creative self together, showing me that my diverse interests—which had seemed like distractions in engineering school—could actually be strengths. In the right context, they could be sources of creativity and innovation.
Over the next couple of years, using HyperCard, I created multiple learning programs, collaborated with a professor in engineering to create animations and simulations for his course on electricity and magnetism and more.
And then there was no looking back.
Educational technology and design became my fields of study. I had found an intellectual home, and an identity, as an educational designer—an identity I hold even today. From IDC, my path led to the University of Illinois, from there to Michigan State, and eventually to Arizona State University, where I now work. I have built a reasonably successful career, one that continues to be meaningful and joyful. Every piece of educational software I’ve designed, every paper I’ve written about creativity and technology, every workshop I’ve led about the role of design in education—it all connects back to that moment in 1988 when I first encountered Bill’s creation.
And most importantly, the through-line has always been Bill’s vision: using technology to help people share ideas, connect knowledge across domains, and hopefully develop wisdom.
Bill understood something that many technologists miss: technology doesn’t just solve the problems we can see—it creates new spaces of possibility. HyperCard wasn’t just about organizing information; it was about democratizing creation, about giving non-programmers the power to share ideas through interactive media.
Though HyperCard would eventually be discontinued as the web emerged and Apple’s priorities shifted, its core philosophy of empowering creative expression through accessible technology would echo through decades of educational technology development.
I am older now, and I have witnessed how technology, despite its beautiful visions, can become deeply problematic. The democratization of knowledge that I first glimpsed with HyperCard, then celebrated with the early web, and watched explode with social media, now lies somewhat in tatters. The power of dynamically representing ideas, of connecting across different domains of knowledge, of crafting powerful learning experiences—all the possibilities that once seemed so promising—have been overshadowed by the aftermath we now deal with in our social, cultural, psychological, and political lives: echo chambers and misinformation, addiction and polarization.
The naive optimism I felt playing with HyperCard in 1988, and later in that computer lab as a grad student at UIUC setting up my first web server, has been tempered by decades of seeing how platforms designed to connect us have been weaponized to divide us. The same tools that promised to democratize knowledge have created new forms of manipulation and control through algorithmic echo chambers, targeted misinformation, and addictive design patterns.
Yet Bill’s vision still holds true. Despite these concerns, these technologies have brought us together, they have provided opportunities for creativity by breaking down barriers, made knowledge accessible at scales never possible before. Perhaps wisdom—that step beyond knowledge that Bill hoped would emerge—requires not just connection, but the careful, thoughtful design of systems that serve human flourishing rather than exploit human vulnerabilities.
Bill Atkinson never knew me, but his work created the conditions for everything I’ve accomplished since. He gave me—and millions of others—a way to see that technology could be a tool for human creativity and connection, not just calculation and efficiency.
In my statement of purpose for graduate school, inspired by my early experiments with HyperCard, I quoted Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”:
Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
This was my vision then, and it remains my vision today. While I can’t know what path my life might have taken otherwise, I’m deeply grateful that Bill Atkinson and HyperCard helped me discover and articulate this vision.
Thank you, Bill, for believing that wisdom could emerge from connection, that technology could serve human creativity, and that even the humblest among us could become creators and publishers of ideas.
Bill Atkinson passed away on June 5, 2025. He was 74 years old. HyperCard was released in August 1987 and shipped free with every Mac, leading to the creation of several million interactive HyperCard stacks by creative people around the world.
Aside: While researching this piece, I stumbled upon a gem from 1987: a detailed account of Bill Atkinson’s presentation of HyperCard to the Stanford Macintosh User Group (SMUG), capturing the moment this groundbreaking tool was first revealed to the world. You should read it in full but here are some key quotes:
Bill said that HyperCard tries to make more of the power of a personal computer available to nonprogrammers. There’s plenty of goodness in using a computer for word processing, spreadsheets and other applications. But to unlock the real power, you have to program, and that’s very hard. HyperCard delivers a lot of the power of programming, but with minimal burden.
Or, you can look at the matter another way. Before HyperCard, the Mac had documents and applications. Documents contain information, but by themselves offer no opportunity for interaction with you. Applications offer interaction, but do not contain information. HyperCard stacks are in between, with a combination of both information and interaction inherent in them.
Or, you can think of HyperCard as a software erector set. It comes with a kit of tools, a set of instructions and lots of parts. Like an erector set, it has one more thing — examples. When you first get the set, you build copies of the ex amples. Then you change a few small details. Eventually you become comfortable with the tools and the parts and start using it fluidly to express your own, original ideas. In the same way, HyperCard comes with dozens of sample stacks. They’re not an afterthought. They’re an integral part of the product, intended to help you use it immediately and learn it quickly.
Here’s what I think. HyperCard is the latest in a long list of “languages” that seek to make computers easy to program. The need is not new, the idea is not new and the solution is not new. What’s special about HyperCard is that it’s brilliantly executed. Biil obviously spent a lot of time thinking and learning about his task before, during and after sitting down to code.
Go head read the entire thing. It is well worth your time.
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