My time with Atkinson came before the Macintosh, before Hypercard. As a company Apple was struggling and we were preparing for what, in retrospect, was the really terrible Apple III. It was a less optimistic time -- after the Apple II and before the Macintosh.

A digression: the roster of Apple-related pancreatic cancer victims is getting longer -- Jef Raskin (2005), Steve Jobs (2011), now Bill Atkinson (2025). The overall pancreatic cancer occurrence rate is 14 per 100,000, so such a cluster is surprising within a small group, but the scientist in me wants to argue that it's just a coincidence, signifying nothing.

Maybe it's the stress of seeing how quickly one's projects become historical footnotes, erased by later events. And maybe it's irrational to expect anything else.