This article <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/bill-atkinson-rip> reports the death of legendary Apple Macintosh pioneer Bill Atkinson, at the age of 74, from cancer. Atkinson is known for, among other things, the “QuickDraw” graphics engine, which was at the core of how those early Macintoshes could manage graphics drawing at interactive speeds, on a processor running at a nominal 8MHz clock speed, with no hardware acceleration. He also created the MacPaint application, to show off the artistic capabilities of the Macintosh -- and its ease of use. There is a video somewhere of Atkinson’s 2-year-old daughter using MacPaint, her tiny fist barely big enough to cover the mouse, otherwise being quite comfortable figuring out the drawing tools. And later, he created HyperCard, which was one of those forays into “end-user programming” which was perhaps more successful than most. Atkinson is named on Apple’s patent for the “region” structure, which was a compact way of representing arbitrary regions of pixels, which might have holes in them or even consist of entirely disjoint pieces. These structures were heavily used in QuickDraw for clipping graphics drawing (particularly for dealing with overlapping windows), though they could be rendered as graphics objects in their own right. Apple’s patent meant that nobody else could use that structure. For example, X11 had to use a less efficient way of representing pixel regions. The patent did finally expire around 2004, I think it was.