Remember this “blast from the past” in the image above? The classic MacPaint application launched with the original Macintosh computer back in 1984 is now part of history, and to assure its legacy, Apple has donated the source code for the application to the Computer History Museum.
With all of the iPhone and iPad news these days, some days it’s hard to remember Apple’s roots on the desktop, and specifically the iconic first Macintosh released way back in 1984. Apple, however, has not forgotten, and MacRumors is reporting that Cupertino has donated the original source code for their historic MacPaint application to the Computer History Museum, according to Businessweek.
“Released in 1984 with the Mac, it is fondly remembered not only by those who used it, but also by computer scientists for numerous first-of-a-kind innovations,” the Businessweek article explains. “Those who spend a lot of time using Adobe Photoshop constantly use such features as the lasso tool for selecting non-rectangular shapes, and the paint bucket for filling closed areas with a pattern, and later, color. Both first appeared in MacPaint. The program was unique at the time for its ability to create graphics that could then be used in other applications.”
Quite a high-tech piece of software for a consumer computer at the time, MacPaint was also featured prominently in Apple’s advertising for the original Macintosh, which also introduced the use of a mouse to click on the screen -- which MacPaint was certainly the best way to demonstrate.
The MacPaint source code is 5,822 lines of Pascal and 3,583 lines of 68000 assembly language and also joins Apple’s QuickDraw library in the Computer History Museum, which makes up 17,101 lines of 68000 assembly code.
Best of all, you don’t have to get in the car and go to some stuffy museum -- just head to the Computer History Museum website and download the source code to your heart’s content.
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