On Jun 9, 2025, at 5:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <[email protected]> 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
