When I attended the SIGGRAPH'85 conference in SanFrancisco in July 1985, Apple gave a side-talk/demo of some of MacPaint's capabilities to an overflow crowd of people, I among them. I think it was Bill Atkinson (who as you know created MacPaint) but it was over 30 years ago so maybe it was somebody else..
Anyway, when he showed off FatBits, not only did the crowd go wild, but I saw artists and others around me who were so strongly impressed by these new and wonderful capabilities, they were moved to tears -- because they could immediately see how they could do their creative work with greater speed and precision, and spend more of their energy creating instead of fighting with their limited tools.
At that time, I was mainly working with MSDOS and DEC RSX-11/M, neither of which had any graphics ability to speak of. I had gone to SIGGRAPH mainly to attend a paper presentation by a colleague, but the Apple side-talk caught my eye. It was a BFD, I must say.
Yoyreally are an apple sycophant. Putting it on a little thick about people crying over Apple graphics in 1984, or is that the liberal in you leaking out?