So I found out today, the Computer History Museum is now hosting the source code for the original MacPaint. That takes me back.
I didn’t start on Macs, they weren’t my first computers, but they were pretty darn close. I’m comfortable with different OS’s now because the first computer my family owned was a PC (an IBM-clone to be precise) and, not long after, when I started school, I got weekly exercises in how to use a Mac. Because Apple was the supplier of choice when it came to my elementary school. Everything was a Mac.
When I was in second grade, I won a science fair. 1st in the school, third at district, a pretty big accomplishment for a 10 year old. How’d I do it? It shouldn’t be a surprise: I wrote a book.
Yes, that’s right. Back in those days, my big science project, the thing that won me a science fair, was a book. Shocker, I know.
More to the point, though, it wasn’t only that I wrote a book. It’s that I illustrated it too. And you get three guesses how I did it.
That’s right. MacPaint.
This book I wrote–a children’s book to say the obvious–was produced completely digitally. I just wanna brag, inaccurate as the title is, that my second grade science project was in digital publishing.
(And for the record, during my remaining years in Elementary School, the only time I won a science fair was when doing something related to computers. Go figure.)
So finding out today that MacPaint (albeit a slightly older version than the one I worked with) is now a museum piece puts me in a pretty nostalgic mood. I can say, as a user, that MacPaint was indeed pretty revolutionary. There was nothing even remotely similar on my PC at home–MSPaint as we know it now wouldn’t come along for a few more years; and yes, I did get heavily into MSPaint when it was released, but it was never quite the same, nor was Paintbrush.
It kinda makes me feel old knowing this, but then again, so does the iPaq palm computer thingy I had in high school, the one my phone can now outperform. The only thing that doesn’t make me feel old is that a TI calculator costs the same and has the same resources as it did when I was younger. And that I can still develop programs in the same language I did in high school. (Which is a stretch–technically, I can still develop in C and Java, both of which I learned in high school, they’ve just changed a bit.)
Oh well, he said with a sigh. Moore’s Law in action. The times, they are a-changin.
