MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
decryption's blog · MacPaint Art From The Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today40 years later and the art people painstaking made in MacPaint on their little Macs still amazes me.
#macpaint
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Kopf hinter #Quickdraw:
#Entwickler Bill #Atkinson mit 74 Jahren verstorben
Durch seine #Arbeit an #Quickdraw und #Macpaint gilt er als wichtiger #Apple- #Entwickler. Nun ist #BillAtkinson an Bauchspeicheldrüsenkrebs verstorben.
#SteveJobs holte Atkinson als Mitarbeiter Nr. 51 zu #Apple und zum ersten Entwicklungsteam der Firma. Dem #Programmierer ist die #Quickdraw- #Bilschirmtechnologie mit ihren auffälligen abgerundeten Ecken zu verdanken.
Golem.de · Kopf hinter Quickdraw: Entwickler Bill Atkinson mit 74 Jahren verstorben - Golem.de
Thank you Bill for all you’ve done. We’re running MacPaint today at the computer museum.
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Go ahead. Take a look at the source code of Bill Atkinson's MacPaint and QuickDraw.
'MacPaint was written by Bill Atkinson, who was a member of the original Macintosh development team. He based it on his earlier LisaSketch (also called SketchPad) for the unsuccessful Apple Lisa computer, so he originally called it MacSketch. He started work on the Mac version in early 1983.
'Atkinson also created Quickdraw first for the Lisa, as LisaGraf. Andy Hertzfeld, another key member of the team, considers QuickDraw “the single most significant component of the original Macintosh technology” in its ability to “push pixels around in the frame buffer at blinding speeds to create the celebrated user interface.”'
https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/
The genius behind MacPaint, HyperCard, and so many other groundbreaking creations has left us. I like to think that Bill Atkinson is now in a better place—one where HyperCard was never discontinued, and its legacy lives on, evolving as it always should have.
"… As suggested by the title of an early manual Inside #MacPaint: Sailing through the Sea of FatBits on a Single-Pixel Raft, FatBits was a killer feature for MacPaint. For Susan Kare, Apple’s in-house graphic designer, the mode accelerated the development of Macintosh’s small bitmap icons where every pixel mattered.
"Marketing pushed to rename “FatBits” “Magnify”, but Atkinson won the argument, arguing that the name gave the program some personality (Young 1985).
"FatBits is restricted to a single zoom level and, within the code, is handled via many special-cased changes to the input and output. The single zoom level restriction was due to the limited hardware; an arbitrary scaling factor would have required too much CPU…"
https://ztoz.blog/posts/macpaint-source-code/
ztoz.blogInvestigating MacPaint's Source Code | ℤ→ℤ
A great new article by Jeffrey Starr, Investigating MacPaint's Source Code: https://ztoz.blog/posts/macpaint-source-code/
ztoz.blogInvestigating MacPaint's Source Code | ℤ→ℤ
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A #MacPaint birthday card to itself. Complete with cat bum, because no compact Mac is complete without a cat sitting on top. #RetroComputing
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I made a fun sweater.
Anyone know the origin/artist of this Ukiyo-e inspired Mac artwork? I found it in MacWorld Sept 1990 pg 330 in an article about Canvas 2.1.
Reverse image search just shows lots of Tumblr sites, but did give a somewhat pixel art version of it.
I cleaned up the image to try to make it 1:1 (there were duplicate rows/cols).
https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9009_September_1990/page/n339/mode/2up
Search my computer for "Mac Paint" ... it suggests Wikipedia.
Search the internet for "mac paint internet archive" ... it emulates it!
https://archive.org/details/mac_Paint_2
Infinite nostalgia.
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Fantastic era videotape of Susan Kare explaining to newsy types that were drooling over the concept that altered computing for the masses:
Fast CompanyWatching Susan Kare explain the Mac UX in 1984 is the most relaxing thing everThis video of the legendary designer offers a master class in beautifully simple UX design.
Matthias Wiesmann The weirdest _codec_ you can find encapsulated in a QuickTime blob inside a QuickDraw picture is probably a MacPaint image: a fixed dimension, PackBit compressed bitmap.
CoreImage does not support that very old format, so I had to write a very simple decoder. I also validated that GIF images encapsulated in QuickTime also work.
That's all for today…
Susan Kare (illustration, bitmap type) & Clement Mok (design), MacPaint Manual, Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, 1983.
Happy birthday to the Apple Macintosh! This week marks 40 years since Apple unveiled the original Macintosh at an event in Cupertino.
Image: Susan Kare, MacPaint sample artwork for Macintosh sales brochure, Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, 1984.
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Updated post with images from the past. #Macintosh #MacPaint #MyFirstMac #Karateka #circuit
My first intro to the #Macintosh was at a local computer store near Seattle around 1984-5 that I would frequent after school. The store owners would kindly let me tinker and test out programs like #MacPaint on it without objection.
It would be many years before I actually owned one.
It changed my life & career.
Thank you Steve & Steve 
My copy of Zen and the Art of the Macintosh (1986) arrived. It's full of wonderful black & white #MacPaint illustrations.
I recently covered this book in SystemTalk #Macintosh history: https://systemtalk.org/post/macintosh-history-8701/#desktop-publisher-of-the-year
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Well, indeed it was disk file access speed. After switching over to a partition, System 7.5.5 boots in under 15 seconds, and anything that touches disk is visibly faster. For example dragging a file onto an application icon would hit the disk each time the drag would travel over another icon because checking whether it would be a suitable drag target often hits disk to check the file types accepted. That took a couple of seconds in some cases before, now it's immediate.
Also, disk files on a pfs3aio volume are slightly faster than on plain #Amiga FFS, but for the system drive it's still much better to use a disk partition.
The AmigaAGA-EVD video driver makes 1-bit monochrome modes have basically zero lag, so here's some #MacPaint heresy... 2-bit grayscale is usable compared to the built-in Shapeshifter driver. Moving on to more colors without making the emulation janky would need a RTG card and/or MuEVD using a beefier CPU with MMU. Maybe soon, for now I'm happy with my weird Mac 
Susan Kare and Bill Atkinson appreciation post.
“Woman Combing her Hair” as drawn by Susan Kare with MacPaint running here on System 6 on an #AppleLisaClone.