I also love this quote: "When the Lisa team was pushing to finalize their software in 1982, project managers started requiring programmers to submit weekly forms reporting on the number of lines of code they had written. Bill Atkinson thought that was silly. For the week in which he had rewritten QuickDraw’s region calculation routines to be six times faster and 2000 lines shorter, he put “-2000″ on the form. After a few more weeks the managers stopped asking him to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."

Even back then we had stupid process.

>Even back then we had stupid process.

Having done this since then, my feeling is we had _more_ stupid process back then than today. It'd take a few hours and a few drinks to get to the bottom of why, but I recall the publication of books like "Code Complete" (1994?) as the beginning of the widespread push back against complete stupidity such as ISO9001.

“It’s an art form, like any other art form… I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code to make them more cleanly organized, more clear. I’m a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read through the code and understand exactly what it’s doing… And maybe that was a little bit counter to what I ran into when I first came to Apple… If you want to get it smooth, you’ve got to rewrite it from scratch at least five times.”

Agreed. Going through that process right now with a tool I am developing. Its 4-5 iterations through various parts of the engine code. Each time, it takes less time and more importantly adds to the quality of the result. It does take longer, however, I am hoping that the efforts spent now to "set the application apart" from the rest, will be what consumers go for (Eg Unique capabilities/performance). In theory. Either that, or I have learnt a big lesson but I take the view that the outcome does not have to be perfect, only better than the rest. Then I will stop iterating. This application is not really the kind I could sit down and design as I am learning and experimenting on the way. Its painful. But with pain, comes growth. In theory.

Amen, Bill. I started my career as a programmer in that era, and I still do this, though less that 5 times as I have a few years of experience.

If anyone is interested, I ported this source code to compile in MPW Pascal. The modified source and binary are available from: http://www.gryphel.com/c/sw/general/macpaint/index.html

Also from the Computer History Museum, a PDF transcript of an interview with Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld discussing the creation of MacPaint and early Apple and Macintosh lore.

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...

Artist Kevin Smith (http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/867.html) acquired a "Fat Mac" (https://www.cultofmac.com/500730/apple-history-fat-mac-quadr...) to produce some of the first digital paintings. Here are some of his prints currently in the exhibit above: https://imgur.com/a/A5dD2

More MacPaint artists here: http://macpaint.org/historical_gallery.html

There are a couple of contemporary artists who are doing some interesting work with this whole "Mac classic style."

http://unomoralez.com https://vimeo.com/mattisdovier

I'm still holding out hope that, at some point, Apple will release the source code to one or more versions of Classic Mac OS. The commercial value has got to be minimal -- it's been off the market since ~2002, and it's all for a platform that no longer exists -- and there's some very interesting stuff in there, like the nanokernel and 68k JIT, or Macintalk, or AOCE...

That software and MacPaint might be more useful to people if it were released as free software: software that respects people's freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share published software even commercially. As it is, there's no language in the license ("This Material is Copyright © 1984 Apple Inc. and is made available only for non-commercial use.") that allows one to do much of anything with MacPaint.

There was some shady Classic Mac OS Source floating about on a Hotline server I used to have access to. I looked at it, but I think it was almost totally in 68000 assembler, so it had minimal use/interest to me at the time.

You're probably thinking of the System 7.1 leak. I've seen that -- it's interesting, but woefully incomplete.

AOCE is something that was just 15 years ahead of its time - it also had some minor (correctable) structural flaws - but still, its a very early peer to peer system, that mostly worked.

And don't forget Cyberdog!

Discussed in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2285569.

Also mentioned in Folklore: https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&to...

The article is written in almost white on a white background. Very web 2.0. Not safe for eyes.

On my browser the text is #5B5B5B on white. Perhaps not dark enough for you, but I personally didn't find it difficult to read. I'm not sure what's going on with your browser that it's white on white.

The link should be updated to point to the Computer History Museum instead of this unofficial GitHub "mirror": http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-...

OK, we changed the URL to that from https://github.com/gotchacode/macpaint.

From the comments on the page: "Well I am a developer too and i respect and understand the joy and excitement of writing amazing code that can create wonderful experiences for people and adds real value to the hardware. But today most developers are like copy paste baboons who love stealing code and ideas."