Apple Donates MacPaint Source Code to Computer History Museum

[ten-oak-druid]

I'm old enough to realize this story is lame.

No you're not.

 

[Advance The Man]

Why couldn't you have simply ignored it all together if it was supposedly of no interest to you? Was someone holding a gun to your head? If we don't know where we come from, how can we know who we are or dream of where we will go next? History is important for putting the present in perspective. Too many people these days have no clue of where they come from and so they have to spend a great deal of time trying to "find" themselves.

A little too philosophical for a forum. But then again, it is an Apple forum.

 

[Dave00]

Unfortunately for those of us who enjoy using Apple's painting and drawing programs, we are stuck with a clunky old appleworks application.

How about donating a new version of these to iwork.

Amen to that. I still use AppleWorks and SuperPaint 3.0 to draw, especially useful for planning out room designs, sketching up maps, etc. There really should be a good draw program as a part of MacOS.

Dave

 

[bretm]

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.

Well I don't know about the controlling, but computers weren't moving forward very fast at all until the internet boom in early / mid 90s. I mean, in 1990 I had at college my Atari 600xl for typing papers and printing them on a dot matrix. The next year I took my Dad's original IBM PC (2 floppy drives, no HD) to school for more advanced papers. Yes, the school had XTs and stuff in the lab, as well as original Macintoshes. But all that stuff was pushing 8 years old. 8 years old wasn't that ancient back then. I could still buy apps for the PC and people still hardly knew what a mac was or even used a mouse. The Lab PCs were running WordPerfect with a big cardboard template across the top of the keyboard showing what the function keys did (because nothing was mouse driven - all dos basically). Windows 3.x was around, but there wasn't any software for it and really was just a nuisance toy until Windows 95 came out which was "more like the mac." It was at this point that Mac quickly became the lesser computer over the next 2 years. Adobe didn't even make software for PC for the most part until 97. Now it's their focus in many areas like Premiere and Dreamweaver. It was in that 95-97 era that Apple dropped the ball. Seems they spent their time suing MS and trying license unprofitable clones. The newton was nifty but expensive. Palm Pilot took care of that!

Alas, many of you are waaay too young to travel this road. But I feel like things are moving forward at a ridiculous pace. Sure companies are trying to hold onto any sort of patents and copyright while they can. While things are moving so fast, the window for a company to make a buck is small. Look at the iPhone. A few glitches in the new model, and a great Droid X and android coming on strong... it can't last forever. Android is already about half the implementation of iOS. And it's picking up speed. The days are starting to resemble the days of Windows 95. Apple insists on keeping everything inhouse to make the best product and OS. However, there are lots of computer manufacturers out there that want to make phones, etc. Well, they gotta make something. And they'll make Android or something else. ALWAYS leaving Apple as a niche market in the end. Which is OK by me, but not great for my AAPL!

 

[arealtvguy]

Mac Paint: Have you forgotten?

Don't you think it would be nice if ANYONE gave credit where credit is due?
The creator of MacPaint was Bill Atkinson.......
How 'bout kudos to him?

 

[arn]

you got that right! for people who actually coded in this language, "assembly" is enough

thank you. I thought I was going insane -- either that or I'm way too old.

I dabbled in 65816 and 68x00 assembly back in the day.

arn

 

[firestarter]

thank you. I thought I was going insane -- either that or I'm way too old.

I dabbled in 65816 and 68x00 assembly back in the day.

arn

Seems that both forms have some merit, probably used in different communities.

I remember it being assembler back from the 6502.

 

[jsalzer]

ClarisWorks Code

I'm waiting to see this story:

Apple Donates ClarisWorks code back to FileMaker, who promptly uses the code to:

1) Create a true "Word Processing" layout mode that allows developers to avoid those pesky page break and flow problems.

2) Add editable gradients to the layout tools.

3) Add arcs to the layout tools

All of which were strangely left out (despite being done and done well in ClarisWorks) and long overdue in FileMaker Pro.

 

[OrganMusic]

The G4 Cube great mistake¿ I had two of them and believe me mistake they where not!

I have and use a slightly upgraded Cube running Leopard on a regular basis.

 

[madmax_2069]

Why in the sams hell would anyone click negative on something like this.

 

[Eric S.]

Why in the sams hell would anyone click negative on something like this.

It has nothing to do with iPods, iPhones, or iPad, and therefore doesn't fit the usual iRumors pattern.

 

[iigsie]

Anyone remember the hole in the At Ease software where if you opened up MacPaint and MacWrite At Ease fell over and gave you full access to the system?

Much simpler back then eh.

 

[blakespot]

Oh my yes! But wasn't that released much later? I only used DP III and IV from '93 onwards.

Deluxe Paint was released in October '85, about a year and a half after Mac Paint. Mac Paint may have had a little more elegance to it, but Deluxe Paint was definitely more advanced. I spent time with both, back in the day.

I've got Deluxe Paint II on my Apple IIgs and Deluxe Paint III, IV, and V on my Amiga 1200. I think DPaint III is my favorite. It's the last version that Dan Silva was directly involved with and represents the peak of it's interface experience.

I recently grabbed an unopened copy of DPaint II for the IIgs, just as a collectible.



blakespot

 

[cageo]

Here we go, my first post to a site I have been visiting almost daily for several years now
This article brought back so many fond memories, this would have been one of the first programs I ever used, back when I was the tender age of 3. Just goes to show how intuitive macs really are
Thanks MacRumors for this story

 

[stevebasset]

Old times

Sorry for the bump of such an old article but I just had to add a few words.

Well this does take me back to the very early days of the Mac and its programming. The operating system itself was a cross between Pascal and 68K.
Remember back then (1980s) that Pascal WAS the darling of a lot of programmers and other Apple machines like the Apple ][ had UCSD Pascal as an option. And remember UCSD Pascal applications were a doddle to port to other computers due to the P-Code standard over ranges like Pinnacle, Sage, DEC etc. etc.

I will say that trying to program it was a nightmare! The programming itself was done on the Lisa computer with two Profile (5mb) hard disks for development with the resultant executable file moved over to the Mac for testing. Remember that early models did only have 128k and that was it!

Programming itself was a pain as there was NO visual basic or Delphi in those days as you had to do ALL the screen formatting yourself. Wish to move a window? Right, copy under screen, move window, paste screen back and then place window over the top.
It was a mess of handles and pointers and recall that my early attempts just locked the computer up!

The company I worked for (1981-1987) was a major software house with close links to Apple UK at the time. I remember very clearly that we had a huge amount of boxes containing the hardware and software documentation as well as programming information for the Mac computer arriving almost daily it seemed.

At the time I had to sign a "secrets document" from Apple UK to keep my mouth shut about the forthcoming computer which turned out to be the Mac.

I still have one of the early 128K models in the loft as well as later 512K ones with with built in hard drives.

And yes, people DID take their Macs about in their holdall bags without thinking twice. It was about as close as you could get to a portable.

Great times.

 

[Rocketman]

And yes, people DID take their Macs about in their holdall bags without thinking twice. It was about as close as you could get to a portable.

Great times.

I took Pascal in college. Here is an image of a Mac+ portable carrying case.