9 Jun
2025
9 Jun
'25
8:19 p.m.
On Jun 9, 2025, at 5:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Wasn't responsible for MacPaint?
That was not "first", or even early, but it was significant.
. . .and wasn't he heavily involved in creating HyperCard, and the Mac pull-down
menus?
I think that he was the one who said, "The Mac was supposed to have four major
software packages; but by the time that it was released, those had become MacWrite,
MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacPaint”
Yes, he was responsible for MacPaint, and HyperCard, and the creation of pull-down menus,
and QuickDraw, and the window manager, and...
He wasn’t the one to make “drawing on a computer screen [...] [a] reality” but he was
responsible for quite a bit of what people recognize as a modern computer interface,
including a mechanisms for allowing a window to continue to update when partially obscured
by another window, a menu, etc. That’s what his “region” data structure was for, which is
an extremely clever way to compactly encode a non-rectangular area of pixels that also
supports very fast membership tests.
-- Chris