Paint Those Blues Away

MacPaint

I never owned a Mac before seven or eight years ago, but every time I could get myself seated in front of one back in the ’80s, the first thing I’d do is launch MacPaint. You drew things with a mouse, various brushes and tools, and a selection of fill patterns. That was it — but there had never been anything like before in simplicity and ease-of-use. Perhaps the most revolutionary thing is that the Mac’s screen used square pixels, instead of the traditional oblongs of every other CRT screen. So when you drew a circle in MacPaint, your square-pixeled printer printed a circle. People using any other computer would print an oval.

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There could be some serious load times if your artwork was any bigger than the workspace, because MacPaint and your creation all had to fit in the original Mac’s 64k of working memory. So any scrolling was accompanied by some pretty lengthy read/writes to the 800k floppy drive.

This website’s banner takes up more than 90k and renders just as quickly as your internet service can pipe it to you.

The point of all this is that MacPaint is back as CloudPaint, completely re-engineered in HTML5. It looks and feels just like the original — but I bet it’s quite a bit bigger than 64k.

Give it a whirl.

(H/T, Gruber.)

*****

Cross-posted from Vodkapundit

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