MacPaint

MacPaint is a bitmap-based image editing computer program that was produced by Apple Computer for bundling with their Macintosh personal computer. After being "forcibly ignored" for some time due to developer backlash, Apple eventually formed Claris to market updated versions of MacPaint and other early Apple software. As of 2004, MacPaint 1.5 and 2.0 is still being sold by Sun Remarketing.

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Despite a short life span, MacPaint was many people's first GUI-based bitmap editing experience, and as such became the seminal work by which similar efforts were measured. The original Mac bundle also included MacWrite, a similarly easy-to-use word processor, and pictures from MacPaint could be placed inside MacWrite documents in a few keystrokes. The pair literally defined user expectations of a GUI-based computer.

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Since the original Macintosh had only a black-and-white monitor, MacPaint only edited monochrome bitmaps with a fixed size of 576 x 720 pixels — the size of the ImageWriter's standard 8 x 10 inch (203 x 204 mm) sheet of paper at 72 DPI (350 ?m).

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Xerox PARC researcher and Apple Fellow Alan Kay made a seminal home videotape showing his one year-old daughter starting a Macintosh 128K computer, inserting a floppy disk containing MacPaint, starting the program, and proceeding to paint with it. MacPaint, in part, represented a paradigm shift where computing had become a useful (and even entertaining) part of ordinary people's lives.

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The first real improvement was FullPaint by Ann Arbor Softworks, then SuperPaint by Silicon Beach Software, PixelPaint by Supermac Technology (the first color-capable paint program) and eventually Adobe Systems introduced Photoshop around the same time Apple debuted the Macintosh IIfx.

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Bitmap: In computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to th...

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