1. A brief info on the origin of Mac Paint
Time of Origin
Bill Atkinson was the original developer of this famous software. He was a member of the original
team of Apple who developed the Macintosh operating system. All earlier versions of this software
which was developed were called Mac Sketch, which is still retaining some part of the name of the
source, Lisa Sketch. Mac Paint was later developed by Claris, which is the software subsidiary of
Apple and that was formed in the year 1987. The most recent version of this software was version
2.0, which was released in 1988. In 1988 the production of this software was stopped since the sale
lowered to a great level.
History of development
 Mac Paint was originally written by Bill Atkinson, a member of the original team of Apple who
developed the Macintosh operating system.
 The software that was developed originally consisted of 5,804 lines written in Pascal
computer code, which was then developed by another 2,738 lines consisting of about 68000
codes of assembly language.
 The user interface of this software was developed by Susan Kare, who was also a member of
the development team of Mac OS. Kare was also a part of the developing team of the beta
testing of this software.
A look into the core working principle
 Generally 2 memory buffers are used by this software which works off the screen in order to
avoid flicker that may occur when dragging some shapes are also some images across the
monitor.
 One of these 2 memory buffers consisted of the existing pixels belonging to the document,
and another one consisted of the pixels which remained in its previous state.
 The second memory buffer was also used as the base code of the undo feature of this
painting software.
 On April 1983, the name of the software was changed from Mac Sketch to its current name
which persisted along.
The original Mac Paint software was programmed in the form of a single-document interface. The
positions of the palettes and their sizes could not be altered, just like the document window which was
unalterable. This was different than any other Macintosh software which prevailed at the time, and this
feature allowed the users in moving the windows and resizing them as needed.
Notable changes from original to modified versions

2. There was no zoom function incorporated in the original version of the software. Instead of applying a
zoom function, there was a special mode used for magnification purposes which was called FatBits.
FatBits helped in showing each pixel in the form of a clickable rectangle along with a white colored
border. The FatBits mode of editing sets the standard to quite a level for many editors of the future.
Mac Paint also included menu named “Goodies” which included this magnifying FatBits tool. Although
this menu was named Aids in the pre released versions, but the name of this Mac Paint menu was
changed to “Goodies” since it was a controversial name as a result of the campaigns based on the
Aids epidemic which occurred in the year of 1983.