By Gaurang Donovan

The source code for MacPaint, the drawing program that shipped with the first Mac in 1984, is going on display at the Computer History Museum (http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/) in Mountain View California on Tuesday. Apple donated the code, along with the code for QuickDraw, to the museum.

MacPaint is 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.

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.