Apple Donates MacPaint Source Code To Computer History Museum | Hacker News Reader

Apple Donates MacPaint Source Code To Computer History Museum

businessweek.com

112 pointsjdub50 comments

In PaintAsm.a:

          .FUNC Monkey
 ;---------------------------------------------------------------------
 ;
 ;  FUNCTION Monkey: BOOLEAN;
 ;
          TST      MonkeyLives                ;IS THE MONKEY ACTIVE ?
          SGE      4(SP)                      ;YES IF >= ZERO
          NEG.B    4(SP)                      ;CONVERT TO PASCAL BOOLEAN
          RTS

According to http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story..., this was used to detect an keypress/mousemove/mousepress-generating testing tool and turn off a few things (Apple menu, File menu, and Quit command, in this case).

MonkeyLives (aka low memory global address $100) was a system global that was usually off. If you saw it on, it indicated that the equivalent of a monkey was loose on the keyboard. IOW, don't do anything dangerous when true.

Always mount a scratch monkey.

If you haven't been, and you're in the bay area, you really should go here. Sure, the nostalgia is wonderful, but they take their work seriously. Last time I went I was talking with one of the docents about an effort they were taking to get the original Unix v1.0 source collected and compiling.

Yes, yes, yes. This is a wonderful place. I visited it when it was just a shack on Moffett Field and now it's in the old SGI building.

If you are in the UK and can't make it to CA then a substitute is the National Museum of Computing: http://tnmoc.org/ It doesn't have the depth of the collection seen in Mountain View, but it does have some wonderful pieces. And the staff worked on the machines that are on display. Got the opportunity to show my SO core memory the other day.

They are currently restoring WITCH to working order: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WITCH_(computer) WITCH used the coolest memory ever: the dekatron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatron). Once WITCH is restored seeing those things glow and rotate is going to make it look like a computer ought to look.

Somewhat related, though the exhibits aren't as nice- The National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland. If nothing else, it's an excuse to venture on to the grounds at Ft. Meade.

When I visited a number of years back, there was a guy selling cell phones on a little folding table outside the front door. Which seemed...odd...for any number of reasons, given the location.

http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/

Agreed. That is also a great place. And if you like that sort of things there's always my book.

Seconded. The docents are, IMO, the most amazing thing about the museum. Incredibly knowledgeable, many of them were involved in making the machines on display. It's a truly wonderful place made more wonderful by the people who are involved.

I haven't been to the Computer History Museum (it's been years since I've been in the Bay area), but I did stop by the American Computer Museum in Bozeman, Montana once on a cross-country drive. For something literally stumbled across in a tour guide I was honestly impressed with the collection. It's worth a look if anyone is ever in the area.

http://www.compustory.com/

As someone who visits the Bay Area and doesn't have a car, how can I reach that museum via public transit? BART doesn't reach that far down in the west bay.

It's up Shoreline. You can take Caltrain to Mountain View and get a taxi from there.

Or post here and maybe someone will drive you.

Google Maps also includes a transit trip planner; enter endpoints as if driving then toggle to the railcar icon (among the car, railcar, walk, bike icons). From SFO to the Computer History Museum it suggests routes using a combination of BART, CalTrain, and VTA bus.

There are three bus stops within a 1 block radius.

Take Caltrain to get to the San Antonio station. Take VTA bus 40 on Showers St and get off on Shoreline.

Hooray!

Andy was my officemate when he was working on this. I have a copy of the thread mentioned in the article.

Andy was my officemate when he was working on this

Can you elaborate on this a bit? You'd have been about 10 at the time (1984), wouldn't you?

I think joshu meant "when he was working on getting the code released."

thanks.

could also have been when folklore.org was written too, I guess

What I want to know is why the latest Apple OS doesn't come with a paint program.

The closest modern relative to MacPaint is probably the paint program in ClarisWorks/AppleWorks, which was ported to Carbon and runs on OS X.

AppleWorks was bundled with all new Mac hardware up until the switch from PPC to Intel in 2006; I still have my copy that came with my iBook G4, still works in Snow Leopard, still reads files created with the original 128k MacPaint. (And my iBook G4 ran MacPaint v2.0, circa 1987, via the Classic VM.)

These days, there are all sorts of great indie and open source paint programs available:

- Paintbrush: http://paintbrush.sourceforge.net/

- Pixelmator: http://www.pixelmator.com/

- Seashore: http://seashore.sourceforge.net/The_Seashore_Project/About.h...

- Skitch: http://skitch.com/

- Omni Graffle: http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/

- Acorn: http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

I'd like to know that too. But there's Paintbrush http://paintbrush.sourceforge.net/

I guess they assume everyone just pirates photoshop.

Acorn 2 has a free version which already packs quite a punch, FWIW.

Why use freeware instead of something like Gimp? http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/

Because GIMP is ugly as sin, a pain to use, overly complicated and terribly huge (the dmg is 78MB versus a 15MB zip file for Acorn). And I'm not even into actual design/drawing.

If you want open source software, at least go with Seashore which doesn't look like complete crap.

Also, because Acorn is a good image editor and the FlyingMeat crew is damn nice.

> GIMP is ugly as sin, a pain to use, overly complicated and terribly huge

And yet you haven't answered ... the investment you make in these tools is substantial anyway. Why would somebody invest in crippleware ... instead of investing in Photoshop (the industry's standard) ... or in an open-source alternative that is just as capable, only more complicated to use and less standard.

Also, you're complaining about 78MB? Really?

Personally I love GIMP ... I even wrote my own plugin written in Python for doing smart-sharpening (based on this tutorial: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Smart_Sharpening/). Yeah ... it was a PITA such functionality wasn't built in, but GIMP provides all the filters you need, upon which you can build your own stuff.

Once you get the initial learning curve (most open-source software is like that), it f*cking rocks. And it's here to stay, and won't disappear into obscurity.

... the investment you make in these tools is substantial anyway. Why would somebody invest in crippleware ... instead of investing in Photoshop (the industry's standard) ... or in an open-source alternative that is just as capable, only more complicated to use and less standard.

I don’t understand that part of your reply at all. Why would you get something else if $program can do everything you want? It’s not as though the concepts are fundamentally different. You don’t even have to learn how to use Acorn.

Anyway, GIMP is ugly as hell and an UI abomination. Even when compared to Photoshop.

> And yet you haven't answered .

Of course I did. You might not have liked my answer, but it won't change: GIMP is garbage.

> Why would somebody invest in crippleware ... instead of investing in Photoshop (the industry's standard)

Acorn is $0 and does the job very well for the basic stuff. Photoshop CS5 is $699. Why pay $699, or spend 6 month trying to understand the alien ways of GIMP, when you can just get Acorn for free and get done with what you need to?

> or in an open-source alternative that is just as capable, only more complicated to use and less standard.

Because it's complete and utter garbage. Open-Source garbage doesn't stink less just because it's so free you can make your own. And again, if you're so stuck on OSS, OSX (which you shouldn't be using in the first place since it's not open) has Seashore, which is serviceable, Cocoa and which I note you conveniently ignored.

> Personally I love GIMP ...

More power to you, eh. You're a minority.

because in many cases Acorn is better (lighter, faster, easier to use)

Well, the original still works pretty well. ;-) I just used MacPaint to paint this portrait of MacPaint programmer Bill Atkinson:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anoved/4813947112/

At this year's edition of Stump the Experts at WWDC, Bill Atkinson went up to the mike and asked the experts what the original name for the HyperCard project was. He got a standing ovation and pimped his photo iPhone app.

Well, what was it? and did he stump them?

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard#History) reports: Work for it began in March 1985 under the name of WildCard

I believe they did phone-a-friend to a retired Apple employee that worked with Bill to get that answer.

The best part was the host paused and told us all that we most likely would not be here in the giant room if it were not for Bill's early contributions (QuickDraw). That was when we gave him the standing ovation.

The best question was what was the first Apple with an Intel chip.

I challenge Hacker News...

Initially I wondered why MacPaint wasn't written in C, but I'm rather grateful it's in Pascal; it's surprisingly easy to read! Although, I suppose Bill Atkinson deserves the credit for that.

I double-clicked on the .rsrc file, since I still have a working resource editor (Resorcerer) on my OS X Mac. No dice; it’s in the ancient MPW “Rez” format that acted as the original way to store resource information for development and source control before being compiled into the classic Mac dual-forked file format. I kind of wish I kept my CodeWarrior discs handy; they still had a Rez compiler that worked under earlier releases of OS X.

Interesting that they didn’t use the “ellipsis” character in the menus, preferring to hardcode the three periods. The Human Interface Guidelines were clear to use the single character (which does look different enough in the Chicago font), and these kinds of typographic details (via the MacRoman character set) were key selling points for the Mac early on.

That can't be right; Rez was a compiler that took plain text symbolic input. Most likely the .rsrc file is just an actual resource fork, encoded maybe in MacBinary format.

There's a command line Rez compiler shipped with Xcode. The name is case-sensitive.

I never thought to look in OS X’s command line only toolbox for that... but it’s just as well. The Xcode version of Rez can’t cope with way this format is written. Even re-saving the file as MacRoman/CR-delimited didn’t help much; the file is using commenting and identifiers unknown to a “modern” Rez file parser. It’s probably written in a dialect that only the Lisa Workshop or MPW can read.

Pascal and C were the subject of protracted language wars, with all the usual accouterments involved with those.

Pascal was very common back then; UCSD Pascal and pCode and Terak boxes were all over the place back in college.

Apple was (then) built on Pascal, and this was markedly different from C on SunOS, ULTRIX VAX and RISC/MIPS, AT&T S3 and SVID,and the early (buggy) VAX C on the odd VMS boxes.

(Java still reminds me of that Pascal and pCode implementation.)

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language):

"Pascal was the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and in the early years of the Mac; parts of the original Macintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal sources. ...the C interface for the Macintosh operating system API had to deal in Pascal data types."

My memory was that C was considered a mainframe and IBM PC language, while the relative elegance and sophistication of Pascal was good style for Macs (esp. when leavened by a bit of assembly code).

It's interesting that there was such a notion, as C was never popular on mainframes.

I think he meant mini computers.

Can anyone tell me what the eyes in the screenshots are? They look like xeyes, but I think that version of Mac predates xeyes. A friend of me claims Apple invented these eyes and the Linux people copied it from them, but I can't find anything about that.

I remember having an extension on system 7 that did that... Probably had been around for a while. There was also one that made footprints go across your desktop during the course of the day and one that made Oscar the Grouch come out of your trash icon.

One other piece of trivia wrapped up in QuickDraw is US patent 4622545 (inventor William D. Atkinson, assigned to Apple Computer). That patent covers the methods required for updating of non-contiguous 2D regions, which could have any imagined shape.

Someone should take that QuickDraw source code and build a hyper-fast version of X-Windows on it.

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