Nostalgia hits us hard, and from time to time we travel in the time machine to revisit the games and programs we grew up with. Today, it's the turn of MacPaint from 1984, a prehistoric painting tool that you can now use directly from your browser.
The full-featured, complex programs we use today also had humble beginnings, with limited options and a rather bare look. Bare by today's standards, of course. For its time, it was the most advanced thing ever seen, and these programs enjoyed undisputed success. One that made history was MacPaint, which in 1984 already came bundled with the Macintosh computers on a floppy disk. Today, thanks to some nostalgic Apple fan, MacPaint is available to use from the browser—just go to the site CloudPaint.
Returning to the history of MacPaint, the drawing program was developed by Bill Atkinson and released simultaneously with the Macintosh 128k in 1984. At that time, it was sold in a bundle with MacWrite for $195 and was a commercial success. With Apple Inc.'s permission, the original source code of MacPaint and the underlying QuickDraw graphics library have now been made available.
The code itself is a museum piece: the high-level logic is written in Apple Pascal and packaged in a single file with 5,822 lines. There are also an additional 3,583 lines of assembly language for Motorola's 68000 microprocessor, implementing the routines required for high performance. And finally, a good set of interfaces for the operating system.
MacPaint had a different name at first, since Bill Atkinson had christened it MacSketch. In that early stage, Atkinson thought extensively about a character recognition routine to turn pixels into text, but later changed his mind because his goal was to create a good drawing program and not a "bad text editor".
According to the program's author, creating it took four years, and it ran on an 8 MHz processor without floating-point operations and with 128k of memory. The development of MacPaint was later taken over by Claris, a software subsidiary of Apple created in 1987. The last version was released in 1988 and the program was discontinued in 1998.
https://old.neoteo.com/microsoft-paintbrush-el-antepasado-del-ms-paint/Official site: Cloudpaint
