Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

MacPaint Source Code Released to Museum

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the keep-it-away-from-ben-stiller dept.

gbooch writes "The Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View, California, is not only a museum of hardware but also a museum of software. Today, with the permission of Apple, the Museum has made available the original source code of MacPaint. MacPaint was written by Bill Atkinson, a member of the original Macintosh development team. Originally called MacSketch, he based it on his earlier LisaSketch (also called SketchPad) for the Apple Lisa computer. Bill started work on the Macintosh version in early 1983. "

4 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Folklore.org by suntory · · Score: 5, Informative

    It has been mentioned a few times here in /., but http://folklore.org/ has a great collection of short stories about MacPaint. Worth the reading for every geek out there

  2. Re:Whaaaa? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    If that's in the source, I think at one time Apple had some testing harness that sent random click events to programs to see if it would crash. That might be what is meant by the monkey.

  3. Re:Whaaaa? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Explanation: it was a reference to Apple's automated testing framework, as per the zero-score reply you can't see:

    http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Monkey_Lives.txt

  4. MacPaint is an example of good code by master_p · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've looked at the source and it shows many good programming traits, like variable and procedure naming that makes sense, separation of concerns (each procedure is short and does only one or two things; and it's procedural), etc. The code is very easy to follow. It shows that good programming is more about the programmer than the programming language.