MacPaint Ships

JAN 24 1984 · 12:00

A pixel-art monster drawn frame by frame. MacPaint, shipped January 1984, made this kind of bitmap painting consumer software. Place: Apple Computer, Cupertino, California Figures: Bill Atkinson, lead developer · Susan Kare, icon and pattern designer · the original Macintosh team 24 January 1984. Steve Jobs unveils the Macintosh at the Flint Center in Cupertino. The 128K machine ships with two applications in the box: MacWrite and MacPaint. MacPaint is Bill Atkinson's, written in roughly 5,800 lines of Pascal and 2,700 lines of 68000 assembly. The canvas is 576x720, one bit per pixel, pure black-and-white. There is a brush palette, a fill bucket, a lasso, a marquee selector, and eight patterns designed by Susan Kare. The interaction model is descended directly from Sketchpad (see [[sketchpad-1963]]) but stripped to consumer simplicity. A child can use it. By the end of 1984, hundreds of thousands of Macintosh owners have produced bitmap images. The medium has, for the first time, a mass amateur production base. The PICT format that MacPaint saves to is the first consumer image format with real adoption. Video: Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld walk through MacPaint at the Computer History Museum.