A brief info on the origin of Mac Paint Time of Origin Bill Atkinson was the original developer of this famous software. He was a member of the original team of Apple who developed the Macintosh operating system. All earlier versions of this software which was developed were called Mac Sketch, which is still retaining some part of the name of the source, Lisa Sketch. Mac Paint was later developed by Claris, which is the software subsidiary of Apple and that was formed in the year 1987. The most recent version of this software was version 2.0, which was released in 1988. In 1988 the production of this software was stopped since the sale lowered to a great level. History of development
Mac Paint was originally written by Bill Atkinson, a member of the original team of Apple who developed the Macintosh operating system.
The software that was developed originally consisted of 5,804 lines written in Pascal computer code, which was then developed by another 2,738 lines consisting of about 68000 codes of assembly language.
The user interface of this software was developed by Susan Kare, who was also a member of the development team of Mac OS. Kare was also a part of the developing team of the beta testing of this software.
A look into the core working principle
Generally 2 memory buffers are used by this software which works off the screen in order to avoid flicker that may occur when dragging some shapes are also some images across the monitor.
One of these 2 memory buffers consisted of the existing pixels belonging to the document, and another one consisted of the pixels which remained in its previous state.
The second memory buffer was also used as the base code of the undo feature of this painting software.
On April 1983, the name of the software was changed from Mac Sketch to its current name which persisted along.
The original Mac Paint software was programmed in the form of a single-document interface. The positions of the palettes and their sizes could not be altered, just like the document window which was unalterable. This was different than any other Macintosh software which prevailed at the time, and this feature allowed the users in moving the windows and resizing them as needed. Notable changes from original to modified versions
There was no zoom function incorporated in the original version of the software. Instead of applying a zoom function, there was a special mode used for magnification purposes which was called FatBits. FatBits helped in showing each pixel in the form of a clickable rectangle along with a white colored border. The FatBits mode of editing sets the standard to quite a level for many editors of the future. Mac Paint also included menu named “Goodies” which included this magnifying FatBits tool. Although this menu was named Aids in the pre released versions, but the name of this Mac Paint menu was changed to “Goodies” since it was a controversial name as a result of the campaigns based on the Aids epidemic which occurred in the year of 1983.