Apple Donates QuickDraw, MacPaint Source to Computer History Museum

Yesterday, Apple released the source code for MacPaint and QuickDraw to the Computer History Museum. As some of the most important pieces of software written in the early days of Apple, MacPaint version 1.3, and QuickDraw are directly downloadable from the Computer History Museum as source code. Both applications remain under a 1984 copyright to Apple, and are made available only for non-commercial use.

“For those who want to see how it worked ‘under the hood’, we are pleased, with the permission of Apple Inc., to make available the original program source code of MacPaint and the underlying QuickDraw graphics library,” the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. states. “The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented,” the museum adds.

Over at the museum’s site, the two downloads then follow, each with a brief description. MacPaint version 1.3 is described as “the drawing program application which interacts with the user, interprets mouse and keyboard requests, and decides what is to be drawn where. The high-level logic is written in Apple Pascal, packaged in a single file with 5,822 lines. There are an additional 3,583 lines of code in assembler language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor, which implement routines needing high performance and some interfaces to the operating system.”

Weighing in on QuickDraw, the Computer History Museum explains that “QuickDraw is the Macintosh library for creating bit-mapped graphics, which was used by MacPaint and other applications. It consists of a total of 17,101 lines in 36 files, all written in assembler language for the 68000.”

Visit the Computer History Museum here for more information and the respective download links for MacPaint and QuickDraw.