Investigating MacPaint's Source Code

MacPaint, released in 1984 with the original Apple Macintosh, was a groundbreaking raster image painting program that introduced many people to mouse-driven controls and tool palettes. Developed by Bill Atkinson, MacPaint leveraged the limitations of its 1-bit monochrome display to improve performance through clever buffer management and bucket filling algorithms. The program's design demonstrated mechanical empathy with the 68k platform and had a significant impact on the development of digital graphic systems, despite some disputed claims of novel features.