Apple donates MacPaint source to museum

MacPaint was one of the first big "wows" of the graphical UI. Before the early days of Mac OS, operating systems were strictly text affairs, and creating graphics was done mostly by writing code. But MacPaint helped to change all of that, putting image creation in a graphical user interface (creating standby design ideas like the "marching ants" selection indicator), and allowing those images to be used in other programs and applications. Now, Apple has donated the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Andy Hertzfeld (who writes about the MacPaint code here) is perhaps the one most responsible for the donation -- he hunted down some original floppy disk copies of the app, and then installed it on a networked Lisa computer to obtain the source code, and then came upon the idea of getting it donated to a museum so everyone could see it. After poking around Apple for a few years, he finally talked to Steve Jobs in January of this year, and Jobs fast-tracked the approval process so the donation could happen today.

Very cool story, and it's excellent to see a little piece of Apple (and computer) history enshrined in a museum. You can get both the MacPaint and QuickDraw source code right off of the museum's website.

[via Clusterflock]

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MacPaint was one of the first big "wows" of the graphical UI. Before the early days of Mac OS, operating systems were strictly text...

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Jim

Inspired by this news, I fired up my Plus and used MacPaint to paint a portrait of MacPaint programmer Bill Atkinson:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anoved/4813947112/

July 20 2010 at 10:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jonathan ober

I remember using this program in middle school in 6th grade. We were all in the lab getting ready to learn how to use this program...me being an artsy guy decided to not listen and start creating. In a matter of minutes I had drawn a full castle with knight and dragon. Before the end of the school year I had made a project using only paint to create a children' book for the elementary school. It was a simple 26 page alphabet book with Seasame Street characters and letters...man those were the days.

Now I am a graphic/website designer and using Photoshop every day. I guess that was my first step to a career!

Thanks Apple...there's an app for that!

July 20 2010 at 9:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

ChuckEye

When I first saw MacPaint, I thought Bill Atkinson was pretty cool.

When I first started programming Macs, I realized that most of the features of MacPaint were just function calls to QuickDraw, and that it was a really simple program...

Then I found out that Bill was the one who wrote QuickDraw, which took his coolness to the next level... :^)

July 20 2010 at 6:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Robert Rash

If it hadn't been for both of those programs I would of never ended up being a designer or getting into computers. I had never seen a mac and only used whatever windows version was out in 1991 and hated it. The mac was a refreshing change. My art teacher made me use QuickDraw and I have been hooked ever since.

July 20 2010 at 6:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

This brings back memories and makes me want to buy a classic Mac.....

July 20 2010 at 6:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply