Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard - amongst many other things - passed earlier this month. There’s a nice summary of his work at MetaFilter, with some departure points to Gruber. I had no idea LSD had prompted the creation of HyperCard.
Hope this isn’t out of turn, but I felt some relevancy here. I never met him, but was shaped by his work.
An immensely brilliant programmer.
Unless my memory is more fallible than I recall, (Is that recursive?) Bill also ported UCSD Pascal to the Apple II. I seem to recall that Jef Raskin had something to do with it as well. UCSD Pascal was an entire operating system, not just a programming language.
UCSD Pascal required memory normally occupied by the ROMs in the Apple II, the Monitor, Applesoft (or Integer BASIC), and the address space for the slots. So the 16K RAM expansion card was developed, giving users access to 64K of RAM in applications other than the UCSD Pascal Operating System.
UCSD Pascal is what made Wizardry possible, for the RPG fans out there.
While I began learning programming with BASIC at USNA, AppleSoft BASIC was a more thorough introduction. Pascal finally made many of the concepts of computer science and programming clearer to me.
Bill was also a photographer, and created an iOS app and service that would make prints of your photos and mail them as postcards to recipients you specified. He ran the business using a Hypercard stack.
By every account I’ve read or heard, not only a brilliant programmer, but a genuinely excellent human being.
I was very sad to read of his passing.
I used Pascal on my Apple II and learned much. Atkinson accomplished much, left lasting value in the world, and helped many.