Ron's MacPaint Gallery Ron's MacPaint Gallery The original 128K (yes, 128 kilobyte) Macs came out when I was a freshman at Yale. I wanted to write a book, so I talked a favourite professor of mine into selling me the one she was allowed to buy under Apple's incentive program -- there was no other way I could get one at the time as a student. (God bless you, Professor.)
The only two programs that came with my machine, besides System 1.0, were MacWrite and MacPaint. I wrote a whole book with MacWrite, The Holey Babble: The New Improved Testament, one chapter at a time (the original MacWrite wouldn't let you create documents more than ten pages long or so).
MacPaint was also cool. Any paint program on the market today can do what it did and more, pretty much, but at the time, it was a revelation. The first time I used the "FatBits" magnification feature, I gasped with wonder. O Bill Atkinson, where are you when we need you?
Anyway, it was possible to do some fairly neat stuff with 72 dpi 1-bit graphics, provided you were patient -- or just loved the machine. (As witness the terrific but out-of-print book Zen and the Art of the Macintosh.) I used to noodle around with MacPaint for hours. Here are some of my noodlings. More coming soon as I dig them up from thirteen-year-old diskettes.
First, a label for a bogus product, done mostly with clip art. (Huh huh, huh huh, he said "toilet!")
Another label, this time for a real "product" I built myself. ("Pot doesn't lead to harder drugs, man, it leads to fuckin' CARPENTRY!" Name that Gen-X comedian.)
... what more can one say?
A small favourite of mine. I was always doing cartoons in MacPaint, thinking of someday doing a comic book. Mike Saenz (of "Virtual Valerie" fame) eventually did do a whole comic book series in MacPaint called Shatter. I still have an issue or two somewhere...
What if legislators who passed unconstitutional laws were fined or imprisoned? Think about it.
I am a CREW Signatory.
Ron Hale-Evans rwhe@ludism.org