If there is such a thing as a software hall of fame, MSPaint deserves to be in the inaugural class. Microsoft has written some real crap over the years, but MSPaint is no one of them. Its a shame that Microsoft seems to have left MSPaint behind after XP. I've tried all the open source MSPaint alternatives, and none of them even come close to being as good as MSPaint. Its like the "Super Mario Bros" of desktop software.
There were tens of better drawing programs meanwhile, for example I remember being able to do animations as a 5 year old kid using the fantastic Fanta Vision program under MS DOS (pity the editing isn't shown in the video):
Unfortunately the leading open source painting programs are remarkably uninspired, interfaces of Gimp and Inkscape are truly a mess, but then artists are hardly Linux users. On OSX there are a lot of great painting programs, for example:
MsPaint only receives that kind of response from people because it was near universally available for a lot of people.
Deluxe Paint is still my favourite, but there's a long list of much better paint programs for the Amiga too, but the vast majority of people who have used MS Paint have never seen any of them.
Deluxe Paint single handedly got me into the animation industry! So great. I was 11 years old, pre-internet, never used a mouse before, and still could find my way around it easily. Animbrushes FTW!
If you like Deluxe Paint you might want to check out grafx2. It's a GPL licensed graphics program inspired by Deluxe Paint. I've been messing around with it a bit, and it's pretty cool. Would probably be useful for sprite art, or similar style art.
Deluxe Paint was an obvious extension of MacPaint for color work, but the ultimate version of it (written by the same people) was Studio/32 for the Mac (which also predates MSPaint). Let's not forget Photoshop and Fractal Painter predate MSPaint.
Deluxe Paint is not an extension/clone of MacPaint unlike most of the early paint applications of the era.
Dan Silva (the creator of Deluxe Paint) worked at Xerox before he got to EA. While there designed an in house paint application for the Xerox Star based on inspiration from SuperPaint by Richard Shoup (at Xerox Parc). When Silva joined EA in 1983, he wrote a version of Doodle for MS DOS for in-house use at EA - this port was named Prism. Deluxe Paint started as an Amiga port of Prism.
(Source: The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, Jimmy Maher, The MIT Ppess Platform Studies series)
So they have shared heritage, given that MacPaint too was largely inspired by work at Xerox, and it's possible Silva made adjustments to Prism/DPaint after MacPaint was released since its release predated the commercial release of DPaint, but the application was already in use before MacPaint was released, though only in-house at EA.
If you look at the SuperPaint UI you can see its influence on some other painting applications too - Koala Painter on the C64 for example has a separate tools page that looks very close to SuperPaint.
But they are fundamentally different in other ways too - DPaint was designed specifically as a tool for artists first, and turned into a product afterwards. You see the difference in the various painting tools and brush support etc. that means you can actually "paint" with DPaint in a way you most certainly can't with MacPaint. The workflow is very different - you can do great things with MacPaint (or MS Paint) too, but it is far more laborious because it's hard to do much freehand drawing with it.
For me, when I moved from the C64, where I'd used Koala Painter - similar in capabilities to MacPaint - to the Amiga and started using Deluxe Paint, I first started drawing the same way I'd done on the C64: Laboriously placing pixel by pixel, with the occasional line draw or flood fill. Freehand was easier than on the C64 thanks to a mouse instead of a joystick, but the tools were not a good fit for that other than for large surfaces. But then I started experimenting with DPaints tools, like smear and blend, and my drawing style changed and got much more fluid and relaxed and it actually carried over to paper as well.
The history is interesting, but the influence of MacPaint on DeluxePaint was absolutely plain. (DeluxePaint clearly had some innovations over MacPaint.) Again, Studio/32 (and Studio/8 and Studio/1) were the full-circle -- the best of everything. Indeed, I often wish Studio/32 had had greater influence than Photoshop, which had and has a far inferior UI.
Source: I used all of these programs at the time, and spoke with people at EA who were familiar with the development of Deluxe Paint and Studio/x.
How exactly? Pretty much all of the functionality in MacPaint is in SuperPaint, which predated it by 6 years (I'm assuming you're not confusing them, but this is the Xerox SuperPaint, not the later Mac application of the same name).
There are some superficial UI similarities between MacPaint and DPaint in how they both switched from a big separate panel of tools to toolbars along the side, but that's pretty much the only similarities I can see between the two that were not already present in SuperPaint, and it's line with a general trend, and even there it's not all that obvious where DPaint draws most of its inspiration.
They differed substantially in that DPaint is geared towards making the entire screen available as a canvas, and most people I know who used DPaint spent most of the time with the UI hidden, only turning it on briefly to pick colours etc., or when using the split screen zoom (to date I hate the way most paint apps do zoom with a vengeance - DPaint had it right).
In many ways the UI of SuperPaint is closer to the UI of DPaint than MacPaint is. The windowed interface with multiple toolbars of MacPaint was totally foreign to Amiga paint apps that for years followed the Deluxe Paint model of putting tools firmly at the screen edges and making them easy to hide.
I don't see much influence from MacPaint that matters frankly, though I'm sure you're right there was some - MacPaint did after all make it out the door sooner and it'd be silly of them not to look at what was well received. But in the overall design, the influence from SuperPaint is plain - all the functionality shared between MacPaint and DPaint was there in Xerox' SuperPaint years before.
Other than their shared heritage with SuperPaint and superficial UI stuff, to me the two are fundamentally different - the "some innovations" is what makes DPaint interesting at all: MacPaint is not usable as a paint application; DPaint is. By the time DPaint came out, the market was flooded with MacPaint clones. But pretty much all of them lacked the paint tools that made DPaint exciting.
I'm not sure where Studio/x comes in - they post-date DPaint by several years as far as I can tell (wow - that's a hard product line to Google; I'd never heard of them before); the field was extremely crowded by then.
I have been using Gimp easily for 10 years now and Inkscape for at least 5, I know them decently well, and I appreciate they at all exist and the hard work that went into at all implementing the individual features. But the UX is terrible and this is objectively so, just sit a new computer user in front of Gimp and watch his agony when trying to use it. The open source "bazaar" model of software development in general isn't the best at coming up with good interfaces, you need a coherent vision of a single person with some authority for that.
Gimp yes, Inkscape no, everyone I sit in front of Inkscape loves it and it made me overcome my feeling of "I'm a programmer, I can't do art" thanks to it's great interface and smooth learning curve.
Some people say a UI must be judged by experienced users, because newbies don't understand it yet. Others say a UI must be judged by newbies, because experienced users get desensitized to UI problems over time. (For example, every programmer can use their own program easily, but that doesn't mean the UI is good.) I think I trust the newbies more, because I've seen many bad UIs that experienced users like, but I haven't seen many bad UIs that newbies like.
Ah, my mistake. I could have sworn I had read something about Bill Gates developing for MacPaint. I think it was to do with editing text that had been placed on an image.
When Windows 95 first came out, it came with a little tutorial booklet by Microsoft with some activities based on Paint, Wordpad &c to show off the desktop tools. I used that booklet to walk students through the new UI, and we always had a lot of fun with Paint, especially when the College obtained a colour printer. Oddly enough, I used the structure of that tutorial - the idea of a walk-through demonstrating features of a default install - when I knocked up a bit of a tutorial for Ubuntu Unity 2d[1]
This splendid gentleman's work appears to be constructed from geometrical shapes plus some pixel level editing. His professional background would have required a very good eye and patience (my partner Ruth can remember pre-computer typography, layout and film-setting having trained as a graphic artist).
I suspect that his use case could be met using mtPaint, a free/libre painting program which allows pixel level editing without palette dithering &c. and which has the geometrical shape tool along with the ability to change what happens when you overlap the shapes. mtPaint can work with 8 bit palettes. Jason Rohrer uses mtPaint for his screens in the 8 bit games he produces [2]. I think the point of this gentleman's work is precisely its pixellated nature and use of primary-ish flat colours.
My takeaway from this thread on HN is that high quality work can come from very simple tools.
Growing up before I knew anything about computers I always asked my parents if I could play on the home PC, which really equated to MSPaint time.
Others might have started off with tinkering with BASIC and whatnot but I think I'm fortunate enough that it turned out to be my gateway drug into computers anyways.
Back in 1995 when I was about 9 my parents paid a princely sum of Rs. 500 to enroll me for 4 classes of MSPaint spread out over 1 month at a local school that had secured two personal computers with color monitors back in India. So, I guess MSPaint was my gateway drug too :-)
[For comparison, I think a loaf of bread in India that time used to cost about Rs. 5.]
The original mspaint.exe has survived all these years by running hassle-free on Wine and on new editions of Windows. But I wouldn't say MS abandoned Paint: Win8's "Fresh Paint" is one of the coolest touch-based apps out there: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/15/behind-th...
Nothing gives me more rage than opening "other" drawing software, selecting the "paint bucket", and clicking anywhere inside an enclosed shape and not seeing it fill with the color I selected.
Layers, vectors. Give me break. MS Paint was more intuitive in the 90's than any software to date.
You could argue MS Paint was about as intuitive as the geoPaint application in GEOS on the C64 [1], which has an almost identical feature set and user interface as MS Paint.
I don't really understand why anyone in their right mind would have anything positive to say about MS Paint except that it is ubiquitous, and they remember having fun with it when they were still a kid. It's really a pretty lousy program, more like what you expect from a code sample shipped with a compiler.
"Every" 8-bit home computer had similar applications, and much earlier than GEOS too, though GEOS is a good counter-example because its windowed and so much more directly comparable.
Hear, hear! I'm not sure why it wasn't copied more widely. Hell, I'm using screenshots / PDFs of my Keynote presentations instead of heavy-weight vector graphics programs.
Paint.NET seems like it should come close to being as good as MSPaint and it was originally developed to be its (spiritual) successor by interns at Microsoft.
Fantastic app. Routinely a reference point for me when I am talking about excellent free software. Wish there was something nearly as good for OS X but almost everything on Mac is terrible and costs good money.
This is hilarious. Not only is MSPaint awful by today's standards, it was awful when it shipped. It was grossly inferior to paint software written for the Mac, Amiga, and DOS.
It does have the ribbon interface though, right? Sure, it's still mostly there- but what made the original so great was its straightforward interface. I find the ribbon interface takes that away.
Pinta has this layer idea more prominent, but it can still be used as simple as you want: http://pinta-project.com/
mtpaint has a lot more features than ms paint. The gui is unintuitive, but if you get used to it I'm sure it's just as easy: http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/
In an age of Photoshop and Illustrator this guy is drawing in an archaic painting program I used when I was in single digits and producing some awesome results.
Being creative has nothing to do with what tools you use at the end of the day. People were creative long before the digital age and this guy has proven you don't need the latest, greatest or most expensive tools to produce a piece of art. Just an idea and any means to explore that idea is all you need.
This is nothing short of inspiring to me. Probably one of the most positive and inspiring things I've seen on HN in a long time.
I read this and I think - what would the creator of MS Paint think if he read this story. As a developer and a creator, if I would ever read a story like this, about a product that I had created, I would think my life to be complete. Stories like this inspire me to keep stretching the boundary of what is possible and to keep creating...
What I thought of was about the importance of process and the notion of a medium. Limitations are essential to creativity. That's why I think talking about "digital photography" as a medium is nonsense, and why I think instagram should be taken seriously.
I'm not sure how I think that relates to what programmers do.
I might even go so far as saying that is isn't about the tool, it's about the enjoyment you get from it. Quality should be important only if it's important to you. For most people it is, but if you enjoy doing something, it shouldn't matter what the quality is.
This story illustrates two things that invalidate a lot of excuses.
1. It's probably not too late to start a new skill.
2. For digital drawing/painting in particular, the tools probably aren't as important as most people think. (Though to say they're not important would be lying. Bad tools shorten your life.)
Having a limited set of tools forces me to be more creative. When I only had simple monophonic synthesizers, the results were much better than with the nearly unlimited sounds at my disposal now.
This is true. I am not expert in PS, so when I use it I basically only use the basic tools that MS paint provide. Unless I use the auto blend feature which is a fantastic.
I think some of this art would be great backgrounds for indie pixel games.
"For digital drawing/painting in particular, the tools probably aren't as important as most people think"
I agree, there's a lot of longevity and capability in older software. Watching this MS Paint video makes me realise we're too quick to dismiss software as outdated or inadequate.
This story reminded me of another artist: an illustrator called Bob Staake who uses Photoshop 3 and a mouse to create his illustrations. He has a series of short videos on his website showing his process
>On the other hand, if he had spent 5 months on photoshop at any point in the past 20 years,
On yet another (third) hand maybe not. It is like saying. "Yeah look he can bike 100 miles _but_ just imagine if he had his drivers' license, he could have driven 2000 miles!". Yeah maybe he could. But it wouldn't be the same story.
> The art is (would be) much better, and useful without the story.
Not matter how much we try it is always tied to the creator. The same doodle can be made by me, but if an elephant does it OMG it is amazing, sell it for $200k! If you don't see the creator or know how they are, it is tied indirectly to them via understanding of the work went into it. For example, maybe I don't know the name but if someone shows me a a large pointillist painting it will be impressive and the work put into it is part of it.
How someone looks at a beautiful piece of art (regardless of whether it's done in Paint, Photoshop or yak dung) and claim "the examples shown have 0 value of any kind" without the age, software and year prefix, is beyond me.
I'd love to have the forest paint in particular in my living room.
Edit: And you've heavily edited your original post to the point it has completely lost its original context. As I recall, what you originally wrote left no room for "misinterpretation" or else that's rather like claiming you intended to fly to Canada and bought a plane ticket to Russia.
Pieces like these (and others, like a 5 year old's painting) can have monetary value.
People might place value on its level of enjoyment, such as yourself.
But artistically, you'd be hard pressed to find any value in this due to its only merit being "made in Windows 95 in 2013" or "made by a 7 year old" or whatever.
Typically, intentionally doing work in a difficult manner for the sake of making it hard on yourself isn't rewarded because it doesn't really add anything.
This piece isn't made better because it was made in Windows 95 and Paint, yet that's the only reason why we're talking about it.
I couldn't disagree with you more. There's a rich tradition[1] in the creative world of improving a product through self-imposed restrictions. Sure, you don't get any artistic credit just because you did something in a difficult way; a single red square has the same merit whether you clicked each pixel in turn or used a flood tool. But exploring the limits of a medium itself certainly does.
How something is made can be a significant part of the price. I remember a report on a painting that was unsigned. Experts were divided on who had painted it. I can't recall the painter's name, but if it was him, the painting was worth $200k. If it was one of his students, as half the experts thought, it was worth $2k. Same painting - only thing different is the 'metadata' for who made it, which made up literally 99% of the value.
Similarly, there is art out there where an aficionado knows how difficult it is to do and hence will pay more for it, where a layperson will say "what crap" and refuse it. The story of a piece often has value over and above the piece itself - and making something to a certain level of quality while using inferior tools can be a valid part of that story.
Typically, extra labor -- that is rewarded -- for an art piece is going to be something that is pertinent for some common end.
Using Windows 95 to paint something doesn't add anything to the end of a piece.
Using marble and creating a structure that looks like a fluid river (or flowing something) adds value to the piece even though it was hard.
Using marble, period, adds value simply because the work is in marble (monetary value) and represents a skill that you can produce works of art in marble. Using Windows 95 means you can use dated technology to produce literally the same thing that Photoshop CS6 could product (most likely in less time): a JPG.
It literally is the same difference as painting a scene with your hands, and then doing it with your feet. Nothing was added and the work is no different, but you did it with your feet.
Again, how it's made forms the story around the piece. If you saw that painting in a jumble sale, with no story, it is irrelevant how it's made. But if you know it was painted with someone's feet, then that becomes part of your appreciation of it, and hence it can become more valuable to you.
I have a small framed bit of Chinese calligraphy ("Laugh") in my bedroom. It's nice in its own way, but nothing special. It was, however, given to me by my half-sister who I only got to know for a couple of years before she died from cancer. That bit of art has a particular story attached to it now, and that story makes it worth so much more to certain people (being 'me', basically) despite the art itself being mundane. The story associated with a piece has a value of its own, sometimes entirely orthogonal to the piece itself.
> But artistically, you'd be hard pressed to find any value in this due to its only merit being "made in Windows 95 in 2013" or "made by a 7 year old" or whatever.
Erm..maybe. Is Erwin Wurm's art art? It is in galleries. It does have monetary value. But it is conceptual. It is basically says here put 15 sweaters on. Or stick your head into a hole in the wooden fence. Is that art? What if I stuck my head in a wooden fence would that be art. What if I told by Wurm to do it and someone took a photo or video of it? Is that art?
It is hard to defend the position of inherent objective artistic value. You are welcome to try it. Art to me has always been an extension of the artist, their life, story motivation and work. On its own it is just up to the art critics to tell us from their high places what is art and what isn't. And that seems to be pretty arbitrary to me so I don't buy that. But maybe you can humor us and give a set of criteria so we can better pick between genuine art and the fake art.
Art is quite subjective, and opinions are... well, personal. Can you declare I'd like Mona Lisa, and not like Hal's work? This guy's work is specifically 8-bit art, where you are meant to see the pixels.
But this argument is like telling painters they produce stuff of no value because they could just take a photograph. Or use a painting effect if they insist on the style.
Art has often a self-limiting aspect that makes it beautiful.
Do you mean that they're worthless because he could have done so much better? Or that the methods are worthless because they won't translate to other programs? Or do you literally mean that they're worthless because they were done in MS paint?
EDIT: Ah, your edit clarified. Yes, you want to move away from bad tools ASAP. Which means that nobody here should be using MS paint when Gimp, Paint.net, Krita and others are available free of charge.
They're both limiting media; the only variant here is degree. The Excel artist prints at a higher resolution... and that's about the only difference really. This is contradictory to your original assertion that it was "worthless" because of the technique used.
Quality of the lines, the resolution, the medium are all irrelevant when art considered on an individual basis and not comparatively.
For the record, I feel like creating my own piece. Not in Paint, but with snips of fabric, paper and glue. It will be a lot of effort, but that effort will be fulfilling. Maybe that's another reason why I appreciate this. There's effort involved that aren't necessary.
But then most of Pollock's work is just splatters of paint without "passion" isn't?
Edit: Arrrgh! I hate it when people delete posts. Now I don't remember what the hell I was replying to or what arguments were made.
Actually, I think Pollock's work is more the other way around — the pieces are the remnant of a bit of performance art the viewer never got to see. While I'm not in any sense a fan of the work aesthetically, it feels even more of a cheat since the process was what was important, not the product. Neither do I particularly care what sort of anguish Mark Rothko may have been feeling when he put a black border around a yellow rectangle — however poetic his intent may have been, he had a piss-poor way of expressing himself. At least the Warhols and Lichtensteins of the period were authentic: they were unashamedly in it for the fame and the bucks.
Apply a filter. There is a Photoshop filter for it, I am pretty sure. Which again brings us to a discussion point. Would that be art? What if this man spend time building a Photoshop filter and starting applying the "pointillism" filter to random images. What if he wrote a script scraped the web, applied the filter and then published it out in his image archive. Would that be impressive? Would we have heard about him?
That's not what he is doing though. He is actually manipulating the pixels, applying the filter will not give him any control over the pixels. He wants to do pointillism, not achieve a pointillism-like effect on a regular painting.
Sorry, I think you misunderstood my intention. I was sarcastic. Read my other post. The GP was saying how well had he spent more hours with Photoshop he could have gotten so much better. Then Parent post said how exactly would have improved the art and my sarcastic response was well just applying a filter.
I don't care what some fancy digital artist complains about above. It's beautiful. You try painting something beautiful with 90% of your vision gone. I imagine you probably dislike Michelangelo's work since he didn't use Photoshop either.
When I was growing up in Oregon, the dude that was the awesomest best skiier, was the guy wearing Levi's and really shitty skis. Some things never change.
I'm a pretty good (acoustic) guitarist, and I swear it's because the guitar I began with probably should have been used as kindling. The action sucked, so I developed excellent finger strength. The poor tension made it really easy to choke a string, so I developed incredible accuracy. It was really "buzzy," so I learned complicated finger-style patterns just so it wouldn't sound so bad when I played.
The first time I got my hands on a real guitar, I sounded like Andres Segovia. :)
I won't say that I never tried to blame my tools after that, but I do often manage to remind myself that when things are going wrong it's probably not the fault of the knife, hammer, programming language . . .
It's always amazing to hear senile (but still sharp) people talk.
97 years of existence must teach a lot about life and what is really important.
I wonder what could be achieved in one particular field of expertise if you devoted all that time to it. It's over 500,000 hours of possible learning ( for a 90 year old ). Some say that 10,000 hours is what takes to gain mastery ( I know this is controversial ).
I like to imagine myself mysteriously falling into some other dimension where I am forced to live for 1000000 years and practice one craft, then returning and comparing my skills to those who had only one short life :) It helps to push the boundary of what seems "impossible" a little bit more.
Starting at 40-50, each decade you loose 2-3% of your neurons. At 90, by that calculation - unless things accelerate further - you'd loose 12% of your neurons. I hope I remain still as sharp when I reach my 90s.
Two statements from Grandpa that made an impact on me:
"I got a lot of patience. That's what you really need anyway." and "When I worked I always had to do something to please the client. Now I can do whatever I want."
Sometimes old tools are better, they have a stable operation and a lower CPU and memory usage. Maybe some famous tools like Photoshop should review their products carefully, they do have abundant functions, but to a certain extent, are they useful or practical for most common users?
Windows "Paintbrush" was the application that piqued my interest in computers back in 1991.
My artistic skills are definitely less than acceptable, and my inability to color within the lines in my grand-children's coloring books is proof.
But with "pbrush.exe" I was ushered into an entirely new realm where even I could draw a straight line, or perfect spheres and polygons.
However, none of my art work ever looked as awesome as that produced by Mr Lasko.
I fell in love with computers during high school, where my teacher would allow me to play pokemon via gba rom in exchange for creating our school brochures and flyers using MSPaint. I have the honor of making the first soft version of our school logo, which the school only have in paper back then. Surprisingly, I didn't learn Photoshop in college and just went full speed to programming, which I hated in high school as it was taught using Visual Basic.
This is one of the most inspiring videos I've had the pleasure of watching. This gives me hope for when (if) I become an old man myself. I do a lot of creative work, and if I ever lost the ability to do or experience those things. It'd just be devastating. Time goes by so quick.
Nice guy and paintings.
Still, I am fed up with the obtrusive "pitch" narrative of these kind of videos. If the resulting sentiment is mainly due to technical style, what does that say about your real values?
Just came here to say this was awesome. Really moving. Inspired by how full of life Hal seems even at his advanced age. Also, really nice to see technology enhance someone's life in such a wholesome, simple way.
This is a great story. These are also the type of stories that should be shared to build bridges between different cultures and communities. The elderly are our nation's treasure.
Whether you are using ancient tools like brushes and oil, or the most cutting edge paint program out there or MS Paint, or whatever, it is the artist's skill that matters.
