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Investigating MacPaint's Source Code
monochromatic raster image painting program that introduced many people to mouse-driven controls, tool palettes, and copy and paste integration with other applications. One of two launch applications for the Apple Macintosh in 1984, MacPaint is emblematic of the Macintosh’s early quirky revolutionary branding, focus on ease of use, and appeal to artistic customers.
This article examines the MacPaint application, how it was built, what are some of the interesting algorithms and engineering trade offs, and how we might measure its impact against the larger industry trends around image painting and rastering technology. Functional composition is used to reduce the impact in certain code paths (e.g. GetFatMouse calls GetMouse and internally performs any necessary conversion), but there are too few abstractions overall to keep the cross-cutting nature of the feature constrained. For historians, MacPaint exhibits the engineering trade-offs necessary to bring forth an application within the limitations of the Macintosh hardware, as well as an example of how a graphical program was expected to be designed by someone who also wrote one of the largest, most foundational libraries.
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