Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2021 July 31

= July 31 =

Deleted Article
Hello, My name is Alan Wilkinson and I am in search of a deleted article about my grandfather Bill Wilkinson. Bill was one of the founders of Optimized Systems Software. It was deleted at his request awhile ago, but he has unfortunately passed away as of 2015. I want to learn more about him and maybe preserve some information that the wiki article might have had. If there is an archive of the article it would be a great help. Thanks, Alan
 * There is no publically accessible archive, but even deleted articles are preserved in Wikipedia, they are just not publically visible. There might be a possibility to review the deleted version. I as administrator could otherwise do that, but the problem is that I don't know where the article is. I would need to know the exact name of the article. Bill Wilkinson currently redirects to William Wilkinson, a disambiguation page. All I could find from the deleted versions was pure obscene vandalism targeted to someone named Bill Wilkinson, which was deleted soon after as a personal insult. J I P  &#124; Talk 02:16, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't think I have any way to find the original link to the article. The closest I've gotten is the Wiki page that lists all the Bill Wilkinson's. On the wayback machine, it says "Bill Wilkinson, one of the chief authors of Atari BASIC" in 2016. But there's no hyperlink for it. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20160224131431/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilkinson ). Not sure if that would help or not.
 * User:SimonTrew added that entry to William Wilkinson in 2009 with the comment "(Added link to Bill Wilkinson who wrote Atari BASIC. This is not brilliant (he probably deserves his own article) but will do for now?)". User:Nikkimaria later removed it in 2019 with the comment "(rm entries without articles)". The entry for the chief author of Atari BASIC had been there for ten years but so far I have found no evidence there had ever been an article about him. J I P  &#124; Talk 13:04, 31 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Search for computer magazines around 1984. He did an interview for one of them. Some notes: OSS was created pretty much in name only. It was a public name for the company we worked for. Bill was the BASIC guy. Many people confuse that with DOS. Amiga DOS was a completely different product. He also worked on Apple. When it all fell apart, he used his savings to purchase the work everyone did and tried to keep it going. I moved to Commodore. So, all in all, nobody made the good decision to switch to Microsoft products. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 13:31, 4 August 2021 (UTC)