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Apple Donates MacPaint Source Code to Computer History Museum

sillypooh said:
When thinking about MacPaint, MacPaint II and MacDraw II, my heart skips a beat and my eyes get wet...

The most fun feature: the brush mirrors. Anyone remembers?

Smiling uncontrollably. :)
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Are you talking about the brush mode where what ever you went over inverted? That was cool - especially in color on the Mac II!
 
Good times

Roller said:
And MacPaint (and MacWrite) ran on a computer with only 128K of RAM and a 400K floppy drive.
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In my university office I have a small collection of my old Macs, including an original Mac. I had a couple of young(ish) academic designers in and they were fawning over it. I told them to reach behind it and turn it on, which they did. It sat there with the icon for the disk. They said "How big's the hard drive", and I handed them a 400k floppy.

They were astonished how quickly it booted up.

Really launched a great conversation about memory optimization, lean code, etc. I *really* think it would be a fantastic learning exercise to teach coding in such a restricted space.

Now, I *could* tell you about my Timex-Sinclair TS1000...
 
fobfob said:
Check out the borders between the toolbars. Wow. Were they floating? If not it seems such a waste of restricted real estate.
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Actually, the toolbars were fixed in place. It made the code much simpler. Remember, this had to fit in 128k of ram after the OS took it's slice, and it had to fit on a 400k floppy with the OS, the app, any "helper" files (rare back then), and any files you saved!

Bloat wasn't even an option back then.
 
68000 Assembly language - that brings back a few memories.

I had to take a summer school course in Assembly language, and it was based on the x86 architecture (this is 1990 or 91). One of the first things the instructor said was how much he hated the x86 and how much better the Motorla 68000 series was, but oh well.

I had grown up on the Apple ][+, Macs and VAX, so I didn't learn to use DOS for a long time. I was actually editing my code on a Mac (since Macs have long been able to read and write PC media), and then carrying it across the hall to the PC lab to assemble it.

(I'm feeling old)
 
This is neat, too bad I can't read this kind of old language :p

Anyway does anyone know why Apple stopped doing MacPaint?
 
geoPaint (part of GEOS) for Commodore 64 was pretty cool in its day, too, although released a year or two after MacPaint.

wjlafrance said:
Although it'd be nostalgically awesome to write a MacPaint clone, it'd almost be a waste of time to port Pascal to Objective-C.
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it would be kinda fun (and almost effortless) to port this to AS3/Air2 for Android Market. i think the most difficult part would be trying to emulate an authentic UI.
 
It would be great if someone came up with a MacPaint app for iPhone or iPad using this source code as a basis. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of us who used MacPaint way back when would buy such an app.
 
Check out the brochure, very cool. Did Apple really think people would throw a Mac into a bag and ride around on their bike?

In one of the ads they actually coin the name "mouse" and describe to people what it is and how to use it.
 
patsfan83 said:
Check out the brochure, very cool. Did Apple really think people would throw a Mac into a bag and ride around on their bike?

In one of the ads they actually coin the name "mouse" and describe to people what it is and how to use it.
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No, mouse was much earlier.

http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

Douglas C. Engelbart "I don't know why we call it a mouse. It started that way and we never changed it."
 
tooz said:
It truly is amazing how far we have come
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Indeed, and a strange world (for some products) we have now.

During the 70's 80's 90's everyone including Apple was pushing forward as hard and fast as they could, trying to present the consumer with as many new things as possible and as many ways to access things as possible.

Now we at a point in time where things exist and we are deliberately blocking/stopping things from being done and restricting devices from offering all they possibly could do.

We are now (for some companies) in the era of "controlling" what people are allowed to do.

I can't say I'm happy about this new path some firms are talking.
 
Never used pascal. Learned fortran, then moved on to C and assembly language.

Now I use any and every tool including objective-c.
 
As cool as it is, it simply reminds me how Mac OS X is lacking a simple image editing program. Maybe they could buy PixelMator. ;)
 
Yvan256 said:
As cool as it is, it simply reminds me how Mac OS X is lacking a simple image editing program. Maybe they could buy PixelMator. ;)
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I never thought of that. I guess Apple thinks the free ones are enough.
I have very fond memories of MacPaint, and when SuperPaint came out I was awestruck. How could it POSSIBLY get any better? :)
 
res1233 said:
Why is there a negative already? How is this story negative? Some people might not really care that apple released the source code, but how is this negative? Trolls? I think so.
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yeah, I don't get it either. How could this be negative??

God forbid Apple contributes something to a museum.
 
Pascal! Holy crap, I know that language! For whatever reason in highschool they offered an AP Pascal Programming class for college credit and I took it (in 2002 no less? Outdated!). I had a really mean computer teacher who was determined to give me a bad grade. But since the final was administered by the college, she couldn't ruin me. I ended up getting the highest grade out of everyone who took the test, and it was a written programming test! Part of it we had to write an entire app in Pascal using only pencil and paper. I only missed a single semicolon! She was so mad but had to give me an A. Yeah, I don't miss highschool! But the nerdy kids would get mad at me because I was still better at programming than them. Lol. I'm more of a closet nerd though.

Haha I feel so nerdy all over! I cant wait to dive into this source code after work. It's probably so clean.
 
What does this have to do with the iPhone and the current antennae issue? :mad:

Seriously though, I have fond memories of MacPaint and MacDraw as an architect student during the mid 80's. Those are the programs that got me hooked on Apple :)
 
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