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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. "

3 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Whaaaa? by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ;
    ; FUNCTION Monkey: BOOLEAN;
    ;
    TST MonkeyLives ;IS THE MONKEY ACTIVE ?

    Funcy monkey.

  2. Abandonware by jabberw0k · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Assuming the source code is still kept in useful form by a company that is not ashamed of it, there is little to lose and much goodwill to be gained by releasing "abandonware" -- but those are two large assumptions, aren't they?

    I have released my HDOS, CP/M, and MS-DOS product source code from the 1980s; there were a few other software packages I sold back then, but I no longer have readable floppies with enough bits of source to release them.

  3. "Best program ever written" by Sits · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember watching a NerdTV interview with Andy Hertzfeld which made mention of MacPaint. Now I've done a search, I've found the transcript of Andy's interview on the web. I'll quote the section I was thinking of:

    [...] an older guy got up and said he thought MacPaint was probably the best program ever written. Was it possible for him to see the source code? It turns out the person asking the question was Don Knuth [...]

    Sounds like Bill Atkinson can cite you and Knuth as fans :)