Hard to believe.  A man who was larger than life in our circle of friends and coworkers is gone.  He was regarded as a wizard in our particular cohort of engineers, enabling computers to perform powerful tasks beyond everyone’s expectations.  He was among the pioneers of computer graphics, a key contributor to a technology that garnered an Academy Award for motion picture special effects.  If, in our work, we encountered an insoluble problem, it was assigned to Bill.  Which he then solved.