MacPaint Source Code Released to Museum 175
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. "
Re:As goes Apple... (Score:3, Informative)
Uh... id has been doing this for years. And id doesn't wait 27 years to do it, either.
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/ [idsoftware.com]
Open, but not Free (Score:1, Informative)
The copyright notice included says, "This Material is Copyright © 1984 Apple Inc. and is made available only for non-commercial use."
Pretty sure that would preclude it from being used for anything except academic study. Certainly it would not be allowed to be contributed to any GPL projects.
Re:Nothing on Mac OS X (Score:3, Informative)
If you install Xcode, you will get a sample app called Sketch. It's pretty much a light version of MacPaint.
Folklore.org (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Whaaaa? (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.
Re:Whaaaa? (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
MacPaint is an example of good code (Score:5, 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.
Re:Nothing on Mac OS X (Score:3, Informative)
/Developer/Examples/Sketch/Sketch.xcodeproj
Apple-B. /Developer/Examples/Sketch/build/Debug/Sketch.app
You don't think something that came with Developer Tools came as just an app did you?
Also means you have to have installed the examples. This is from the latest version of XCode on Snow Leopard.
Re:Open, but not Free (Score:3, Informative)
Will be? It isn't relevant now, in terms of actual utility. It was written against a toolkit that no longer ships for a machine which had 128KB of RAM and a monochrome screen.
The only relevance that it has at all is historical. It was one of the showcase applications at the launch of the original Mac and so it's interesting to see how people worked on such resource-constrained systems. You wouldn't do things the same way now - even a cheap mobile phone is a few orders of magnitude more powerful than the original Mac and so the original constraints do not apply.
Even if they did, I doubt many people starting today would want a load of m68k assembly and Pascal. You could maybe rewrite the assembly functions in terms of a modern toolkit and recompile the Pascal to run on a new system, but there are much better drawing programs available for free - including some in Apple's developer examples (under a permissive license).
Re:Nothing on Mac OS X (Score:2, Informative)
I rather like this for quick and simple things:
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
It's under active development again. The "preview snapshot" is quite nice.
Re:Nothing on Mac OS X (Score:1, Informative)
If you install Xcode, you will get a sample app called Sketch. It's pretty much a light version of MacPaint.
I just built and ran Sketch, and it's a basic object-oriented drawing program (eg. a baby Illustrator or Visio) not a bitmapped painting program like MacPaint or MS Paint (a baby Photoshop.)
Re:QuickDraw (Score:3, Informative)
QuickDraw's addons and new APIs were an extension, but core QuickDraw is required for the entire Mac UI. That was a system level API.
Re:Oh wow (Score:3, Informative)
15 colours.
Which is 13 more than the Mac had.
(Personally I preferred painting with 4096 colours...)
No, the Apple II (not the Macintosh) was limited to 15 colors in low-res and 8 in hi-res. The Macintosh II, released in 1987, was capable of 24-bit color, which is something like millions of colors more than 15.
Re:Too sad. (Score:3, Informative)
Pretty much *all* of the classic Mac software was written in Pascal -- it was Apple's premier development system. C didn't really catch on outside the UNIX world until the mid to late 1980s.
Not just a Converter: GraphicConverter (Score:3, Informative)
... by Thorsten Lemke (Lemkesoft):
http://www.lemkesoft.com/content/188/graphicconverter.html [lemkesoft.com]
What's especially great with this software:
Thorsten is still supporting Mac OS Classic (i.e. Mac OS 9 running natively) users by providing specific versions of GraphicConverter for their OS.
Mac OS X being supported too, of course.
Walter.
Re:As goes Apple... (Score:4, Informative)
This is perhaps the most ill-constructed wealth of ignorance posted on Slashdot for a while, at least without original intent to be tardy.
Copyright protects creative works. Whereas published works may have required copyright notice [loc.gov] on the work (before 1989), or deposit with the Library of Congress [loc.gov], unpublished works have never required a copyright notice [copyright.gov] for protection. If you created it, you have the copyright on it, and can take protective action against others distributing copies of your work.
Patents protect exclusive distribution of inventions. We do not do the exact same thing with patents. Patents allow you to take legal action and prohibit competitors from making infringing products.
Trade secrets are secrets as long as they are kept secret, but 'infringing' products are not actionable. You have not publicly declared that you invented something, so if someone else invents it they can use it too (and might even be able to patent it if you haven't created prior art implementing your invention). There are only legal covenants (and criminal liability in some states) to prevent employee disclosure, theft, or espionage. Trade secrets can include non-copyrightable or non-patentable things such as the formula for Red Bull.
Software, which is currently under discussion, can have all: patentable (think Amazon one-click checkout patent), under copyright (as the Amazon web server software is, even if undisclosed), and contain trade secrets (such as server cloud optimization routines to speed processing).
If you work for Apple and released the source code to 1984's Macintosh File System you would be breaching your non-disclosure trade secret agreement with Apple. The disclosed software would still be covered by copyright, and features or inventions implemented in the software may be covered by patents too. Many software patents are so vague in their description (merely describing the end result or user interface) that the actual implementation in code may indeed be a trade secret too.
Re:Too sad. (Score:2, Informative)
Apple's TOS for the iPhone don't care what language you write your app in just so long as it compiles to native machine code for the A4 processor.
From the TOS:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).