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Bill Atkinson, former Apple employee who made computers easy, passes away
- IBJ Bureau
- Jun 09, 2025
Bill Atkinson, a former employee of Apple who developed the Macintosh graphical user interface (GUI) and some early smartphones, has passed away at the age of 74.
Mr Atkinson, popularly known as employee number 51 at Apple, was one of the brilliant minds that shaped not only the future of Apple but the computer industry in general. Although Mr Atkinson was known for his work on nature photography, his name was forever linked to the Macintosh – an icon of the 1980s that revolutionised the way we looked at computers.
Had it not been for Steve Jobs, the former Apple founder and CEO, Mr Atkinson would have pursued PhD in neurobiology and may have gone on to do different things. However, the field of computers was his calling, and if it was not for him, the world would not have experienced the GUI on computers early in the 1980s. Mr Atkinson’s work on user interfaces made the Macintosh an icon of the technology industry.
Mr Atkinson is credited with inventing numerous GUI elements that modern computing cannot do without. These include pull-down menus, double-click to open files, folders and applications, the selection lasso for selecting irregular shapes in graphics programmes and the marching ants-animated dotted lines to indicate a selected.
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