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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. "

12 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Oh wow by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Oh wow, I still remember the first time I saw MacPaint-- there was nothing like it. Bill Atkinson did a superb job, shoehorning all those features so they could run in 128K of RAM.

    He just barely made it-- I remember trying to find how much memory my desk accessory could use while MacPaint was running, and when you did a "print preview", the available RAM went down to like 1800 bytes! Yikes!

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

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

    Funcy monkey.

    1. 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.

    2. 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

  3. 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.

  4. Nothing on Mac OS X by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Funny how Macs now lack the equivalent of MacPaint.

  5. Probably infringes some 1987 mspaint patent by originalhack · · Score: 4, Funny


    The problem with this is that Apple was so innovative that they can infringe patents for ideas that other large companies came up with years later.

  6. 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

  7. Re:As goes Apple... by Digital+Vomit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hopefully this starts a trend where companies release their source to the world once they're done with it.

    That was kind of the point with the concept of "copyright": that the copyrighted work in question would enter the public domain after a short time in order to enrich society as a whole.

    What *should* be happening, at the very least, is that a full copy (including source and binaries, in the case of software) of any copyrighted work be placed in government escrow so that it can be released to the public after the copyright expires (which should be about five or ten years, in the case of software).

    How sad that copyright law has been twisted so terribly by the rich and powerful to the detriment of human civilization.

    --
    Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
  8. 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.

  9. "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 :)

  10. Did anyone spot this one... by Linker3000 · · Score: 4, Funny

    ;
    ; Wrist Test - see if user is gripping left front
    ; edge of mouse as this will cause drawing
    ; performance to drop-off
    ;
    FUNCTION WristTest : Boolean;


    Uncanny eh!?

    --
    AT&ROFLMAO