Kid Pix, the 1989 original, in your browser Free & complete
1989 · Craig Hickman · System 6 · Mini vMac (Mac Plus) · 512×342 black and white
Guide updated September 2026 · needs your own copy
Craig Hickman wrote Kid Pix because he watched his three-year-old son try to use MacPaint and fail. Everything in MacPaint punished a mistake; nothing in it made a noise. So he built a drawing program where every tool was obvious, every action made a sound, and nothing you did could be wrong.
This is version 1.0 from 1989 — the one Hickman gave away himself, before Brøderbund published it commercially. It is black and white, it runs on an emulated Mac Plus, and it is the fastest thing on this site: the whole machine is 512 by 342 pixels and starts instantly.
Controls
| Mouse | Draw, and pick tools from the palette on the left |
| Click and hold a tool | Opens that tool's variations along the bottom |
| Cmd-Z | Undo — although the eraser is more fun |
| Cmd-S | Save your picture inside the emulated Mac |
| Cmd-Q | Quit to the Finder |
This is Kid Pix 1.0, the version Craig Hickman wrote for his son and released himself in 1989 as non-commercial software, before Brøderbund picked it up and published the commercial 1.1 in 1991. The later Brøderbund releases are not hosted here.
Get a copy
- Kid Pix 1.0 at the Internet Archive — the non-commercial 1989 version.
- Macintosh Repository — the same version with the original disk layout.
How it works & what to expect
| Machine | Macintosh Plus, 4 MB RAM, 512×342 black and white |
|---|---|
| System | System 6.0.8 |
| Emulator | Mini vMac, compiled to WebAssembly |
| Speed | Instant. This runs comfortably on a phone. |
| Sound | Yes, and the sounds are half the point. Click inside the screen once to let the browser play audio. |
A Mac Plus is a tiny machine by any modern measure — eight megahertz, one megabyte of RAM as standard — which is why this is the lightest emulation on the site. It is also why the screen is black and white and rather small. That is not a limitation of the emulator; that was the computer.
The tools worth finding
Kid Pix's design principle was that a child should be able to discover everything by poking at it, so the descriptions below are slightly against the spirit of the thing. Poke at it first.
- The Wacky Brush. Not one brush — a menu of them. Bubbles, dripping paint, a trail of little shapes, echoes of whatever you last drew.
- The stick of dynamite. One of the erasers. It blows the whole picture up, with a bang.
- The rubber stamps. A tray of small black-and-white icons — animals, vehicles, faces — that you stamp anywhere.
- The Electric Mixer. Takes whatever is on the page and scrambles it, in one of several increasingly alarming ways.
- The letter stamps. Type and each letter arrives with a sound.
Everything makes a noise. The pencil squeaks, the paint can splats, the eraser goes whoosh. Hickman recorded a lot of these himself.
What happened next
Brøderbund published Kid Pix commercially in 1991 and it became one of the best-selling pieces of educational software of the decade. Kid Pix Companion followed in 1992 with the slideshow feature, then Kid Pix 2 in 1994 brought colour, and the line continued under Brøderbund, The Learning Company and Riverdeep for years afterwards.
The version here is the one before all of that: Hickman's own release, black and white, with the sounds he recorded and the tools he chose. Plenty of people who loved Kid Pix as children have never seen it. It holds up remarkably well, partly because a program built so that a three-year-old cannot get it wrong turns out to be a pleasant thing for an adult too.
Questions people ask
Is this the Kid Pix I remember?
If you remember colour, it is not — you are remembering Kid Pix 2 from 1994 or later. This is the original 1989 black-and-white version, which is the direct ancestor: same tools, same sounds, same dynamite.
Is it really free?
Yes. Craig Hickman released version 1.0 himself as non-commercial software before Brøderbund published the commercial version. The later Brøderbund releases are not hosted here.
Why is it black and white?
Because the Macintosh Plus it was written for was black and white. Colour Macs existed in 1989 but were expensive, and Kid Pix was built to run on the cheap machine a school or a family actually had.
Can I save or print my picture?
You can save it inside the emulated Mac and it will still be there next time. Getting it out to a real file on your computer is not wired up yet — it is on the list.
Does it work on a phone or tablet?
Yes, and better than most things here. The emulated machine is small and simple, and drawing with a finger turns out to suit it.
Who made it?
Craig Hickman, an art professor at the University of Oregon, who wrote it for his son Ben after watching him struggle with MacPaint. He has said the core idea was that a drawing program for a small child should have no wrong moves.