Bill Atkinson

Atkinson was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, on March 17, 1951. He grew up in Los Gatos, California, the third child of seven born to anesthesiologist John Atkinson and obstetrician Ethel Dana Atkinson. He had two brothers and four sisters. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, San Diego, where Jef Raskin, who would go on to develop the Apple Macintosh, was one of his professors. Atkinson continued his studies as a graduate student in neurochemistry at the University of Washington.

In 1990, Atkinson and two others co-founded Apple spin-off General Magic. Byte magazine wrote:

The obstacles to General Magic's success may appear daunting, but General Magic is not your typical start-up company. Its partners include some of the biggest players in the worlds of computing, communications, and consumer electronics, and it's loaded with top-notch engineers who have been given a clean slate to reinvent traditional approaches to ubiquitous worldwide communications.

In 2007, Atkinson began working as an outside developer with Numenta, a startup working on computer intelligence. On his work there Atkinson said, "what Numenta is doing is more fundamentally important to society than the personal computer and the rise of the Internet."

Atkinson was married three times and had two daughters, a stepson, and a stepdaughter. He died from pancreatic cancer in Portola Valley, California, on June 5, 2025, at the age of 74.

Atkinson was a devoted advocate for the use of 5-MeO-DMT, an inhalable short-acting psychedelic drug. He personally used the drug hundreds of times between 2012 and his 2025 death. He helped to create and refine a pen-shaped vaporizer that made low, controlled doses of the drug possible and easy; previously, it had been typically vaporized in a pipe from a solid form, with frequently unreliable dosing that led to unpredictable effects on the user. He gave away up to a thousand such vape-pens in an effort to spread the use of low-dose 5-MeO-DMT among therapists and practitioners. He also anonymously wrote and updated a detailed guide on how to create such vape-pens, and published it on the popular Erowid drug-nerd website.