MacPaint, the program that sold the Macintosh Runs well
1984 · Apple Computer / Bill Atkinson · System 6 · Mini vMac (Mac Plus) · 512×342 black and white
Guide updated September 2026 · needs your own copy
In January 1984 almost nobody had used a mouse. MacPaint is the program that explained it. You pick up a brush, you drag, and paint appears — obvious now, astonishing then, and the single most effective demonstration Apple had of why a Macintosh was different from everything else on a desk.
Bill Atkinson wrote it, and it is a remarkable piece of engineering as well as a remarkable piece of design: full-page bitmap editing with smooth interactive dragging, on a machine with 128 kilobytes of memory.
Controls
| Mouse | Everything. That is the point. |
| Double-click a tool | Opens its options, such as brush shape |
| Cmd-Z | Undo |
| Shift-drag | Constrain a line or a shape |
| Cmd-Q | Quit |
MacPaint's source code was donated by Apple to the Computer History Museum in 2010 and published for non-commercial use. The application binary remains Apple's. It is here for the same reason the Museum published the source: it is a landmark, and it should be possible to actually use it.
Read the source
- Computer History Museum — the original MacPaint and QuickDraw source, published with Apple's permission.
- Macintosh Garden — the application itself.
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 |
Black and white is not a limitation of the emulation; the Macintosh had no colour until 1987, and MacPaint's entire visual vocabulary — the fifty-ish fill patterns along the bottom of the window — exists because black and white was all there was.
What to try
- The fill patterns. Double-click one to edit it. A pattern editor, in 1984, in 128K.
- The lasso versus the marquee. The lasso shrinks to fit whatever you drew; the marquee takes a rectangle. Atkinson wrote the lasso because a rectangle was the wrong selection for a drawing.
- FatBits. Zoom to individual pixels while a small inset shows the drawing at normal size. Still the right design.
- The spray can and the paint bucket. Both arrived here first for most people who ever used them.
Why it mattered
MacPaint shipped free with every Macintosh, alongside MacWrite, because a computer with a graphical interface and nothing graphical to do would have been a hard sell. It was written in Pascal and assembly and fitted into a machine with no hard disk, and the interactive performance it achieved on that hardware is the part programmers still find impressive.
Apple donated the source code to the Computer History Museum in 2010, and it can be read there. Almost every raster graphics program since owes it something: the tool palette down the left, the marquee, the lasso, the pixel zoom, the pattern fill. Photoshop's interface is a direct descendant.
Kid Pix, also on this site, was written explicitly as a reaction to it — Craig Hickman watched his three-year-old fail to use MacPaint and built something with no wrong moves.
Questions people ask
Is this the original MacPaint?
Yes, the Macintosh application, running on an emulated Macintosh rather than re-implemented in JavaScript.
Why is everything black and white?
The 1984 Macintosh had a one-bit display. Colour did not arrive until the Macintosh II in 1987.
Who wrote MacPaint?
Bill Atkinson, who also wrote QuickDraw — the Mac's graphics engine — and later HyperCard.
Can I save my drawing?
Inside the emulated Mac, yes. Getting it out to a file on your own computer is not wired up yet.
Is the source code available?
Apple donated it to the Computer History Museum in 2010 and it is published there for non-commercial use.
What is FatBits?
MacPaint's pixel zoom, with a small inset showing the drawing at normal size while you edit individual pixels. Every image editor since has a version of it.