A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows ’95 | Hacker News Reader

A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows ’95

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596 pointstvladeck136 comments

If there is such a thing as a software hall of fame, MSPaint deserves to be in the inaugural class. Microsoft has written some real crap over the years, but MSPaint is no one of them. Its a shame that Microsoft seems to have left MSPaint behind after XP. I've tried all the open source MSPaint alternatives, and none of them even come close to being as good as MSPaint. Its like the "Super Mario Bros" of desktop software.

I have copied mspaint.exe from a WinXP machine. It doesn't seem to have any prerequisites, and still works fine!

Win8 still have it.

It does have the ribbon interface though, right? Sure, it's still mostly there- but what made the original so great was its straightforward interface. I find the ribbon interface takes that away.

You find the ribbon in Paint confusing?

HN: Git is intuitive and Windows Paint is not straightforward.

It's there on Windows 7. Just select the Windows Start button, type in paint and hit return.

It's not nearly as nice an interface, though.

have you tried paint.net? i really like it for doing pixel art.

Growing up before I knew anything about computers I always asked my parents if I could play on the home PC, which really equated to MSPaint time.

Others might have started off with tinkering with BASIC and whatnot but I think I'm fortunate enough that it turned out to be my gateway drug into computers anyways.

Back in 1995 when I was about 9 my parents paid a princely sum of Rs. 500 to enroll me for 4 classes of MSPaint spread out over 1 month at a local school that had secured two personal computers with color monitors back in India. So, I guess MSPaint was my gateway drug too :-) [For comparison, I think a loaf of bread in India that time used to cost about Rs. 5.]

The original mspaint.exe has survived all these years by running hassle-free on Wine and on new editions of Windows. But I wouldn't say MS abandoned Paint: Win8's "Fresh Paint" is one of the coolest touch-based apps out there: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/15/behind-th...

Nothing gives me more rage than opening "other" drawing software, selecting the "paint bucket", and clicking anywhere inside an enclosed shape and not seeing it fill with the color I selected.

Layers, vectors. Give me break. MS Paint was more intuitive in the 90's than any software to date.

Hear, hear! I'm not sure why it wasn't copied more widely. Hell, I'm using screenshots / PDFs of my Keynote presentations instead of heavy-weight vector graphics programs.

You could argue MS Paint was about as intuitive as the geoPaint application in GEOS on the C64 [1], which has an almost identical feature set and user interface as MS Paint.

I don't really understand why anyone in their right mind would have anything positive to say about MS Paint except that it is ubiquitous, and they remember having fun with it when they were still a kid. It's really a pretty lousy program, more like what you expect from a code sample shipped with a compiler.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_%288-bit_operating_system%...

"Every" 8-bit home computer had similar applications, and much earlier than GEOS too, though GEOS is a good counter-example because its windowed and so much more directly comparable.

You must be kidding. It's a solid step back from Sketchpad developed in 1963:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuKREmsiD9o

Apple had an almost identical drawing program in the early MacOS version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPaint

There were tens of better drawing programs meanwhile, for example I remember being able to do animations as a 5 year old kid using the fantastic Fanta Vision program under MS DOS (pity the editing isn't shown in the video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjj7Yf3JRvE http://www.old-games.com/download/5732/fanta-vision

Unfortunately the leading open source painting programs are remarkably uninspired, interfaces of Gimp and Inkscape are truly a mess, but then artists are hardly Linux users. On OSX there are a lot of great painting programs, for example:

http://www.artrage.com/artrage-4-samples.html

Try Mypaint or Krita as alternatives to Gimp and please do not bad-mouth FOSS painting tools if you do not know them.

Or Pinta, which is like Paint.net, although a little less polished.

I have been using Gimp easily for 10 years now and Inkscape for at least 5, I know them decently well, and I appreciate they at all exist and the hard work that went into at all implementing the individual features. But the UX is terrible and this is objectively so, just sit a new computer user in front of Gimp and watch his agony when trying to use it. The open source "bazaar" model of software development in general isn't the best at coming up with good interfaces, you need a coherent vision of a single person with some authority for that.

> But the UX is terrible and this is objectively so, just sit a new computer user in front of Gimp and watch his agony when trying to use it.

This is not the only objective measure of UX.

Some people say a UI must be judged by experienced users, because newbies don't understand it yet. Others say a UI must be judged by newbies, because experienced users get desensitized to UI problems over time. (For example, every programmer can use their own program easily, but that doesn't mean the UI is good.) I think I trust the newbies more, because I've seen many bad UIs that experienced users like, but I haven't seen many bad UIs that newbies like.

What are the objective measures of UX? Isn't the USER experience inherently subjective?

So? Ever sat someone down to Photoshop? UX is mostly built upon previous experience.

BTW you replied to a comment that suggested looking at alternatives to Gimp...

Photoshop has a lot more stuff, but when I just want to draw a circle or something I can actually find where to do it. Gimp is a real mess.

The brush and pen tools are right there in the toolbox.

Gimp yes, Inkscape no, everyone I sit in front of Inkscape loves it and it made me overcome my feeling of "I'm a programmer, I can't do art" thanks to it's great interface and smooth learning curve.

I feel Inkscape has a great UI, too. I never used Illustrator, which seems to be the benchmark for "semi-pro" use of such vector graphics tools.

The GIMP I use because I'm used to it, but I find the interface a little annoying.

I think Inkscape is basically the best open source graphics program there is. It's unfortunate to have it get a bunch "drive by insults".

Even if someone doesn't like Inkscape, the issue of Inkscape's interface is completely different from the issue of The Gimp's interface.

>Apple had an almost identical drawing program in the early MacOS version:

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPaint

Because Bill Gates wrote MacPaint. When Windows was in development, he likely wrote MSPaint, or at-least got a developer to make it similar.

What? The very wikipedia page you're quoting says:

The original MacPaint was developed by Bill Atkinson, a member of Apple's original Macintosh development team.

Ah, my mistake. I could have sworn I had read something about Bill Gates developing for MacPaint. I think it was to do with editing text that had been placed on an image.

MsPaint only receives that kind of response from people because it was near universally available for a lot of people.

Deluxe Paint is still my favourite, but there's a long list of much better paint programs for the Amiga too, but the vast majority of people who have used MS Paint have never seen any of them.

Deluxe Paint single handedly got me into the animation industry! So great. I was 11 years old, pre-internet, never used a mouse before, and still could find my way around it easily. Animbrushes FTW!

Deluxe Paint was an obvious extension of MacPaint for color work, but the ultimate version of it (written by the same people) was Studio/32 for the Mac (which also predates MSPaint). Let's not forget Photoshop and Fractal Painter predate MSPaint.

Deluxe Paint is not an extension/clone of MacPaint unlike most of the early paint applications of the era.

Dan Silva (the creator of Deluxe Paint) worked at Xerox before he got to EA. While there designed an in house paint application for the Xerox Star based on inspiration from SuperPaint by Richard Shoup (at Xerox Parc). When Silva joined EA in 1983, he wrote a version of Doodle for MS DOS for in-house use at EA - this port was named Prism. Deluxe Paint started as an Amiga port of Prism.

(Source: The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, Jimmy Maher, The MIT Ppess Platform Studies series)

So they have shared heritage, given that MacPaint too was largely inspired by work at Xerox, and it's possible Silva made adjustments to Prism/DPaint after MacPaint was released since its release predated the commercial release of DPaint, but the application was already in use before MacPaint was released, though only in-house at EA.

If you look at the SuperPaint UI you can see its influence on some other painting applications too - Koala Painter on the C64 for example has a separate tools page that looks very close to SuperPaint.

But they are fundamentally different in other ways too - DPaint was designed specifically as a tool for artists first, and turned into a product afterwards. You see the difference in the various painting tools and brush support etc. that means you can actually "paint" with DPaint in a way you most certainly can't with MacPaint. The workflow is very different - you can do great things with MacPaint (or MS Paint) too, but it is far more laborious because it's hard to do much freehand drawing with it.

For me, when I moved from the C64, where I'd used Koala Painter - similar in capabilities to MacPaint - to the Amiga and started using Deluxe Paint, I first started drawing the same way I'd done on the C64: Laboriously placing pixel by pixel, with the occasional line draw or flood fill. Freehand was easier than on the C64 thanks to a mouse instead of a joystick, but the tools were not a good fit for that other than for large surfaces. But then I started experimenting with DPaints tools, like smear and blend, and my drawing style changed and got much more fluid and relaxed and it actually carried over to paper as well.

The history is interesting, but the influence of MacPaint on DeluxePaint was absolutely plain. (DeluxePaint clearly had some innovations over MacPaint.) Again, Studio/32 (and Studio/8 and Studio/1) were the full-circle -- the best of everything. Indeed, I often wish Studio/32 had had greater influence than Photoshop, which had and has a far inferior UI.

Source: I used all of these programs at the time, and spoke with people at EA who were familiar with the development of Deluxe Paint and Studio/x.

How exactly? Pretty much all of the functionality in MacPaint is in SuperPaint, which predated it by 6 years (I'm assuming you're not confusing them, but this is the Xerox SuperPaint, not the later Mac application of the same name).

There are some superficial UI similarities between MacPaint and DPaint in how they both switched from a big separate panel of tools to toolbars along the side, but that's pretty much the only similarities I can see between the two that were not already present in SuperPaint, and it's line with a general trend, and even there it's not all that obvious where DPaint draws most of its inspiration.

They differed substantially in that DPaint is geared towards making the entire screen available as a canvas, and most people I know who used DPaint spent most of the time with the UI hidden, only turning it on briefly to pick colours etc., or when using the split screen zoom (to date I hate the way most paint apps do zoom with a vengeance - DPaint had it right).

In many ways the UI of SuperPaint is closer to the UI of DPaint than MacPaint is. The windowed interface with multiple toolbars of MacPaint was totally foreign to Amiga paint apps that for years followed the Deluxe Paint model of putting tools firmly at the screen edges and making them easy to hide.

I don't see much influence from MacPaint that matters frankly, though I'm sure you're right there was some - MacPaint did after all make it out the door sooner and it'd be silly of them not to look at what was well received. But in the overall design, the influence from SuperPaint is plain - all the functionality shared between MacPaint and DPaint was there in Xerox' SuperPaint years before.

Other than their shared heritage with SuperPaint and superficial UI stuff, to me the two are fundamentally different - the "some innovations" is what makes DPaint interesting at all: MacPaint is not usable as a paint application; DPaint is. By the time DPaint came out, the market was flooded with MacPaint clones. But pretty much all of them lacked the paint tools that made DPaint exciting.

I'm not sure where Studio/x comes in - they post-date DPaint by several years as far as I can tell (wow - that's a hard product line to Google; I'd never heard of them before); the field was extremely crowded by then.

If you like Deluxe Paint you might want to check out grafx2. It's a GPL licensed graphics program inspired by Deluxe Paint. I've been messing around with it a bit, and it's pretty cool. Would probably be useful for sprite art, or similar style art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrafX2 http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/

Deluxe Paint II was lightyears ahead of MS Paint, back in the 80s.

Absolutely, for this type of work Deluxe paint would make him more productive because of much better zoom tools and palette management.

When Windows 95 first came out, it came with a little tutorial booklet by Microsoft with some activities based on Paint, Wordpad &c to show off the desktop tools. I used that booklet to walk students through the new UI, and we always had a lot of fun with Paint, especially when the College obtained a colour printer. Oddly enough, I used the structure of that tutorial - the idea of a walk-through demonstrating features of a default install - when I knocked up a bit of a tutorial for Ubuntu Unity 2d[1]

This splendid gentleman's work appears to be constructed from geometrical shapes plus some pixel level editing. His professional background would have required a very good eye and patience (my partner Ruth can remember pre-computer typography, layout and film-setting having trained as a graphic artist).

I suspect that his use case could be met using mtPaint, a free/libre painting program which allows pixel level editing without palette dithering &c. and which has the geometrical shape tool along with the ability to change what happens when you overlap the shapes. mtPaint can work with 8 bit palettes. Jason Rohrer uses mtPaint for his screens in the 8 bit games he produces [2]. I think the point of this gentleman's work is precisely its pixellated nature and use of primary-ish flat colours.

My takeaway from this thread on HN is that high quality work can come from very simple tools.

[1] http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/files/unity2dguide.pdf

[2] http://jason.rohrer.usesthis.com/

> I've tried all the open source MSPaint alternatives, and none of them even come close to being as good as MSPaint.

KDE's kolourpaint is basically a clone with more features: http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Pinta has this layer idea more prominent, but it can still be used as simple as you want: http://pinta-project.com/

mtpaint has a lot more features than ms paint. The gui is unintuitive, but if you get used to it I'm sure it's just as easy: http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/

This is hilarious. Not only is MSPaint awful by today's standards, it was awful when it shipped. It was grossly inferior to paint software written for the Mac, Amiga, and DOS.

My daughter actually asked me to install the XP version of MSPaint when she got a new laptop with Windows 7.

Paint.NET seems like it should come close to being as good as MSPaint and it was originally developed to be its (spiritual) successor by interns at Microsoft.

http://getpaint.net

Fantastic app. Routinely a reference point for me when I am talking about excellent free software. Wish there was something nearly as good for OS X but almost everything on Mac is terrible and costs good money.

If you are looking for a current good alternative to MSPaint that is easy to use, I suggest http://www.getpaint.net/. Free, but not OSS.

In an age of Photoshop and Illustrator this guy is drawing in an archaic painting program I used when I was in single digits and producing some awesome results.

I don't care whether or not you think MsPaint is lame, old or other debatable points about it, you can't argue this piece in particular 'Rambo' is awesome: http://hallasko.com/collections/prints/products/rambo

Being creative has nothing to do with what tools you use at the end of the day. People were creative long before the digital age and this guy has proven you don't need the latest, greatest or most expensive tools to produce a piece of art. Just an idea and any means to explore that idea is all you need.

This is nothing short of inspiring to me. Probably one of the most positive and inspiring things I've seen on HN in a long time.

I read this and I think - what would the creator of MS Paint think if he read this story. As a developer and a creator, if I would ever read a story like this, about a product that I had created, I would think my life to be complete. Stories like this inspire me to keep stretching the boundary of what is possible and to keep creating...

Wow!

Just goes to show it's not about what tool you use, it's about your skills and what you can do with it.

We would do well to remember this in all the programming language debates we like to have here.

Unless it's about text editors. Then you can't get _anything_ done if you don't use ed.

I might even go so far as saying that is isn't about the tool, it's about the enjoyment you get from it. Quality should be important only if it's important to you. For most people it is, but if you enjoy doing something, it shouldn't matter what the quality is.

I agree, I just posted the same sentiment, sorry for being redundant.

What I thought of was about the importance of process and the notion of a medium. Limitations are essential to creativity. That's why I think talking about "digital photography" as a medium is nonsense, and why I think instagram should be taken seriously.

I'm not sure how I think that relates to what programmers do.

Absolutely. Further highlighted by the link at the end of the story to a page on Tatsuo Horiuchi, who creates his artwork with.....Excel!

http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel...

agreed, but it might also be a testament to how good a tool ms paint is

This story illustrates two things that invalidate a lot of excuses.

1. It's probably not too late to start a new skill.

2. For digital drawing/painting in particular, the tools probably aren't as important as most people think. (Though to say they're not important would be lying. Bad tools shorten your life.)

Older tools can be liberating because you have to work within their modest set of features. Choice isn't always a good thing etc.

This is true. I am not expert in PS, so when I use it I basically only use the basic tools that MS paint provide. Unless I use the auto blend feature which is a fantastic.

I think some of this art would be great backgrounds for indie pixel games.

Having a limited set of tools forces me to be more creative. When I only had simple monophonic synthesizers, the results were much better than with the nearly unlimited sounds at my disposal now.

I take your point, however, have you considered simulating a simple analogue synthesiser in something like PD?

"For digital drawing/painting in particular, the tools probably aren't as important as most people think"

I agree, there's a lot of longevity and capability in older software. Watching this MS Paint video makes me realise we're too quick to dismiss software as outdated or inadequate.

This story reminded me of another artist: an illustrator called Bob Staake who uses Photoshop 3 and a mouse to create his illustrations. He has a series of short videos on his website showing his process

http://www.bobstaake.com/pixfix/films.shtml

I don't care what some fancy digital artist complains about above. It's beautiful. You try painting something beautiful with 90% of your vision gone. I imagine you probably dislike Michelangelo's work since he didn't use Photoshop either.

A quote I once heard but can't remember the attribution "you don't need better tools, you need to do better with the tools you have"

also http://readwrite.com/2013/06/11/excel-is-an-art-form-these-b...

When I was growing up in Oregon, the dude that was the awesomest best skiier, was the guy wearing Levi's and really shitty skis. Some things never change.

I'm a pretty good (acoustic) guitarist, and I swear it's because the guitar I began with probably should have been used as kindling. The action sucked, so I developed excellent finger strength. The poor tension made it really easy to choke a string, so I developed incredible accuracy. It was really "buzzy," so I learned complicated finger-style patterns just so it wouldn't sound so bad when I played.

The first time I got my hands on a real guitar, I sounded like Andres Segovia. :)

I won't say that I never tried to blame my tools after that, but I do often manage to remind myself that when things are going wrong it's probably not the fault of the knife, hammer, programming language . . .

Reminds me of Seasick Steve. He plays a guitar with 3 strings missing. Sounds better than most with all 6.

look up Brushy One String

It's always amazing to hear senile (but still sharp) people talk.

97 years of existence must teach a lot about life and what is really important.

I wonder what could be achieved in one particular field of expertise if you devoted all that time to it. It's over 500,000 hours of possible learning ( for a 90 year old ). Some say that 10,000 hours is what takes to gain mastery ( I know this is controversial ).

I like to imagine myself mysteriously falling into some other dimension where I am forced to live for 1000000 years and practice one craft, then returning and comparing my skills to those who had only one short life :) It helps to push the boundary of what seems "impossible" a little bit more.

Starting at 40-50, each decade you loose 2-3% of your neurons. At 90, by that calculation - unless things accelerate further - you'd loose 12% of your neurons. I hope I remain still as sharp when I reach my 90s.

http://www.xkcd.com/505/

That was beautiful.

Two statements from Grandpa that made an impact on me: "I got a lot of patience. That's what you really need anyway." and "When I worked I always had to do something to please the client. Now I can do whatever I want."

Sometimes old tools are better, they have a stable operation and a lower CPU and memory usage. Maybe some famous tools like Photoshop should review their products carefully, they do have abundant functions, but to a certain extent, are they useful or practical for most common users?

Best wishes to this great man.

>are they useful or practical for most common users?

Photoshop purchased legitimately is extremely expensive, it's not targeted at common users.

Photoshop Elements is (somewhat) cheap, targeted at the everyman, and suffers from those problems though.

It's not wise to simply judge a product's user by its price. MS Office professional is expensive, most users are still ordinary people.

I have to admit that the video made me tear. As a graphic artist myself, this man is my ultimate hero!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb3A1TdqXug this one is more impressive to me than his artwork

That link is pretty darn good, but don't forget the 97 year old guy is nearly blind.

I agree that it shows awesome mastery of paint, but the 97 year gentleman is making his own art - he just uses paint to do it.

Windows "Paintbrush" was the application that piqued my interest in computers back in 1991. My artistic skills are definitely less than acceptable, and my inability to color within the lines in my grand-children's coloring books is proof. But with "pbrush.exe" I was ushered into an entirely new realm where even I could draw a straight line, or perfect spheres and polygons.

However, none of my art work ever looked as awesome as that produced by Mr Lasko.

Has anyone found any of his paintings in native resolution? I'd agree if you said that was a requirement to fully appreciate pixel art.

The title reminded me of "Hyperbole and a Half" http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-unde... which manages to fit some pretty complex emotional expressions into mspaint-based stick figures.

On a similar note, you can send in suggestions to this guy and he'll draw them in MS-Paint

http://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/

There are a lot of really funny ones in there

Truly a beautiful thing.

After a while, most HN posts just fade away in my memory.

I will remember this one forever.

I fell in love with computers during high school, where my teacher would allow me to play pokemon via gba rom in exchange for creating our school brochures and flyers using MSPaint. I have the honor of making the first soft version of our school logo, which the school only have in paper back then. Surprisingly, I didn't learn Photoshop in college and just went full speed to programming, which I hated in high school as it was taught using Visual Basic.

I use Paint:

1)when I'm bored. http://www.flickr.com/photos/bhu1st/4911339994/

2)when I've to crop/edit quick screenshots

3) while teaching students about web design process (I do design/prototype quick web page layouts using paint).

4)meme generator ! Stitch images quickly to share it online.

While switching to Linux or other OS I sometime unknowingly try to hit win-r->mspaint.

This is cool. It demonstrates that imagination is more important than tools. I'm going to code in Notepad.exe today as a show of support.

We spend so much time discussing to death the tools we use, time which should be spent using them instead. This man just got on with it.

This is one of the most inspiring videos I've had the pleasure of watching. This gives me hope for when (if) I become an old man myself. I do a lot of creative work, and if I ever lost the ability to do or experience those things. It'd just be devastating. Time goes by so quick.

Nice guy and paintings. Still, I am fed up with the obtrusive "pitch" narrative of these kind of videos. If the resulting sentiment is mainly due to technical style, what does that say about your real values?

Just came here to say this was awesome. Really moving. Inspired by how full of life Hal seems even at his advanced age. Also, really nice to see technology enhance someone's life in such a wholesome, simple way.

This is a great story. These are also the type of stories that should be shared to build bridges between different cultures and communities. The elderly are our nation's treasure.

They are. And soon we'll be them. I hope my NES works when I'm 90. And I'm hoping they still have a copy of Notepad and javac.exe around for me.

Whether you are using ancient tools like brushes and oil, or the most cutting edge paint program out there or MS Paint, or whatever, it is the artist's skill that matters.

Yay :) The video made me very happy. Thanks for sharing.

it's not the tool it's how you use it

This was so inspirational and amazing that I purchased two prints for my office.

Nice work grandpa!

This should be called "A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws".. MAN capitalized

Prints! Shut up and take my money! Oh, that's a lot of money...

this man is inspiring, what a beautiful story

i love MS Paint - I work in a large marketing firm and use it everyday sometimes on advertisements that a million people see

MS Paint. What a classic.

No layers... wow. I wish I still had win 95 to try to draw without any layer

You can use GIMP or Photoshop without adding layers.

I'm impressed.

Truly stunning.

Who DARE challenge the power of MS Paint?

http://www.elftor.com/elftor.php?number=112

kool

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