The story was that Atkinson saw the Parc and it's GUI and said to himself "holy shit they're doing their graphics this way" and write QuickDraw based on that.
The Parc didn't do its graphics that way at all, and Atkinson (and Apple) got a lot of patents on his region code. That code is also why the Mac's graphics performance was so much better than everyone else's (until discrete GPUs came out). It's that fast.
Apple's software guys were really good back in the day. Their software-based floating point stuff (SANE) was faster and more accurate than Intel's hardware FP stuff for a long time.
The Parc didn't do its graphics that way at all, and Atkinson (and Apple) got a lot of patents on his region code. That code is also why the Mac's graphics performance was so much better than everyone else's (until discrete GPUs came out). It's that fast.
Apple's software guys were really good back in the day. Their software-based floating point stuff (SANE) was faster and more accurate than Intel's hardware FP stuff for a long time.