For anyone (like me) wondering who this guy was, he was a prominent UI guy at Apple back in the day. According to Wikipedia he created the menu bar, QuickDraw, and HyperCard.
For whomever submits stories like this, please say who the person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I've heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.
The idea that information can be hyperlinked together predated HyperCard by decades. It goes back to https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m..., which was written in 1945. The same essay also has the fundamental ideas for a citation index.
This gave rise both to the Science Citation Index and to various hypertext systems. For example the famous 1968 presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY, now known as "The Mother of All Demos", demonstrated a working hypertext system among the other jaw-dropping accomplishments.
HyperCard brought hypertext to commodity hardware. The Web made a distributed hypertext system viable. Google's PageRank recombined hypertext and the Science Citation Index to make the web more usable. And all of the key insights trace back to Vannevar Bush. Who was able to have such deep insights in 1945 because he had been working in, and thinking about, computing at least since 1927.
The history of important ideas in computing generally goes far deeper than most programmers are aware.
I'm not claiming the idea didn't exist but Atkinson's HyperCard turned it into a viable product and the creators of the web credited him for their inspiration.
> The idea that information can be hyperlinked together.
HyperCard was really cool and I miss it. Its most important feature IMO was to enable non-programmers to rather easily author useful software. As happend with Excel.
The idea that information can be hyperlinked is much older than HyperCard. Check out Ted Nelson and his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu which predates HyperCard by more than a decade.
I'm pretty obsessed with these 'branches not taken' concepts in computing. Like, everything is the same today. And there's good usability arguments that things shouldn't be different for the sake of being different. But, there are so many forgotten concepts of the past that were arguably much more powerful, simple, expressive ways to interact with machines.
For whomever submits stories like this, please say who the person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I've heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.