One of the true innovators of the reading of text on the screen, Bill Hill, died yesterday. Hill will be remembered primarily as one of the inventors of Microsoft's ClearType screen typography system, but his impact on our screen experience spanned a quarter century. Robert Scoble, interviewed Hill many times, says that Hill worked behind-the-scenes, but was “one of the greats.”
Hill started out as a newspaper writer for 20 years in Scotland. In 1986 he joined Aldus on their seminal PageMaker layout program. He was approached by Microsoft in 1994 to run its typography group. He left Microsoft in 2009 and worked on screen-reading projects. He died Wednesday of a sudden heart attack.
He realized early that the iPad would be trouble for Microsoft and Amazon. “The trouble is trying to innovate at Microsoft, which is a company of geeks, run by geeks, and dominated by Windows,” he complained candidly.
All of his achievements were rooted in a respect for our humanity and a desire to make our tools work for us. He considered the most important operating system to be not Windows or Linux, but "Homo Sapiens Version 1.0. It shipped about a hundred thousand years ago. There’s no upgrade in sight. But it’s the one that runs everything.” You can see him discuss this concept in an historical context in this 2004 video from Microsoft's Channel 9:
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