The development of MacPaint reads like a modern-day monomyth to any young programmer. Its protagonist — Bill Atkinson — crafts 5,804 lines of Pascal code, augmented by another 2,738 lines of assembly language, which compiled into less than .05 megabytes of executable code to produce a seminal program. He follows that up by creating HyperCard. That’s like the coding equivalent of hitting an inside-the-park home run and turning a triple-play in the same game.

Of course the cast is larger than just Bill, with important contributions from Susan Kare, and Andy Hertzfeld, but really — MacPaint is Bill’s baby. There’s a funny answer Steve Jobs gave to a reporters question of how many years it took to write QuickDraw (MacPaint’s underlying graphics-display library):

“Twenty-four man-years.”

Jobs figured that one Atkinson year was equal to six ordinary programmer years.

Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson with the original Macintosh.

Atkinson describes MacPaint as “the first widely distributed bitmap painting program that let people learn to use a mouse by drawing things”. The program featured ground-breaking paradigms for digital drawing, like cut-copy-paste-undo, a pattern palette, tool-bar, simulated zooming (called fat bits mode), and advanced selection mechanics. It was intended to be a trojan horse for a new interaction model, but turned out to be the match-strike of the desktop publishing revolution.

Near simultaneously as Atkinson created MacPaint, Dan Silva wrote the first version of Deluxe Paint for the 1985 launch of arguably the most creative and capable PC of the 80's — the Commodore Amiga. DPaint (as it was widely known) used the same features as MacPaint but with additional tools that leveraged the Amiga’s unique features like indexed colour, where a pixel’s colour value does not carry any RGB hue information but instead is an index to a colour palette. Say hello to colour cycling.

The superficial similarity between both programs was not by imitation, like [Microsoft] Paint (which was a sheepish clone). Silva had previously worked at Xerox prototyping user interface designs for the Star system — the birth place of the modern GUI and ancestor of both applications. They were siblings, and as a family were hugely influential. Incredibly, DPaint is still being used today by demosceners and pixel artists. That’s staying power.

What makes the history of these applications so special is that the principal programmers were their own audience — artists. Bill is an accomplished nature photographer, and Dan is a very early computer graphics artist who had previously written Prism — an Electronics Arts in-house art tool for game artists. Not surprisingly, DPaint was basically a repackaged version of Prism tailored to the Amiga.

The DPaint zooming feature.

Atkinson and Silva had built the early instruments to an artistic revolution that would realize previously impossible works and create entire industries. I’m not sure the care and detail exhibited in those applications would’ve been possible had they not been effectively written by their intended audience.

Apple and Commodore recognized the transformative nature of these tools. Famously, both tried to commission Andy Warhol to produce some art pieces and showcase the potential of their platforms. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs recounts an event from that time. Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and a number of other prominent artists were in attendance for Sean Lennon’s ninth birthday party at the Dakota Apartments in NYC. Jobs was also there — with a Macintosh in-tow. It was a gift for Sean. Warhol, after getting a brief demo, tried his hand at MacPaint and turned enthusiastically to Haring:

“Look! Keith! I drew a circle!”

The enthusiasm faded, and Warhol never returned calls from Jobs. Shortly after, Commodore approached him with the Amiga, and subsequently blew his mind. Warhol’s main reservation about the Mac was that it was greyscale — and, well — we’re talking about Andy Warhol after all. Colour was a requirement. The advanced fill algorithms and tooling that Silva had programmed meant Warhol could produce his preferred style easily.

Graphicraft was a simpler drawing program for the Amiga that was quickly supplanted by DPaint.

Warhol went on to produce dozens of works on the Amiga, recently recovered by Cory Arcangel and the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club. The images are relatively primitive in their technical scope, but these were early days.

It makes you wonder, had Warhol not passed away in 1987 how would his art have evolved to the present? In a larger context, the answer is unimportant. What Warhol demonstrated, along with other artists like Keith Haring and Laurence Gartel, was the potential for a new form of expression. And of course, digital publishing tools did change the world. We had a new artistic medium, and these were the early explorers.

By Los Angeles-based illustrator Hank Hinton.

Suddenly thousands of artists, creators, and hobbyists had access to the medium of digital publishing. The technical complexity and underpinnings of what they were using had been completely hidden by Atkinson and Silva. All that mattered was the artists idea, which was free to be realized. MacPaint and DPaint were the original abstraction layer for the tedious process of producing digital art.