Comment by lutusp
20 hours ago
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.
If there was a link, I would be thinking about all the superfund sites in Silicon Valley, pondering the manufacture of the Apple II, demographic clustering, or whether there was an unusually strong smoking culture at young Apple Computer, rather than some unique mental stress of the job.
Steve Jobs had pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, which is not the traditional form of the pancreatic cancer people usually talk about. It is far less aggressive and completely treatable, in fact almost 100% curable as Jobs had it diagnosed at such an early stage.