MacPaint Source Code Released to Museum

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. "

Hypercard?

[thittesd0375]

Once Hypercard is open source then the world will be complete.

Whaaaa?

[Sponge Bath]

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

Funcy monkey.

Abandonware

[jabberw0k]

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 [wlindley.com]; 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.

This is beyond Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly. That program was a major milestone for computers. With QuickDraw, no less.

Last missing point is the whole Mac OS rom, the early System and including the Finder. That would be amazing...

--fred

and Quickdraw

[Teese]

or some early parts of it (download on the same page). That seems even more interesting to me.

"Best program ever written"

[Sits]

I remember watching a NerdTV interview with Andy Hertzfeld [pbs.org] which made mention of MacPaint. Now I've done a search, I've found the transcript of Andy's interview [pbs.org] 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 :)

Re:Open, but not Free

[TheRaven64]

The TI-89a has a much smaller screen than MacPaint had, and it likely interfaces to it in a different way. None of the Mac toolbox APIs are available and, most importantly, the TI-89a has no mouse and so controlling an app designed exclusively for a mouse would be painful.

Writing a drawing program from scratch for the calculator would be simpler than porting MacPaint - indeed, a port would likely become a complete rewrite by the time it was finished.