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The original comment from blue highway and your reply in which you basically ratified his claim:

"there’s no way that screen image of the graphics program that spelled out hello was able to do that in 1984. Way too smooth and no pixels. It was photoshopped even though Adobe’s Photoshop didn’t arrive until 1990."
That's because it was done pixel-by-pixel in 1983 on a Lisa, and then ported to the Mac as a graphic image for the photo shoot to be ready for the product intro in 1984.

To which I replied:

"No, they did not. It was easily reproducible on an original Mac. I've done it myself, using MacPaint. . . not the "Hello", but my own signature and other graphics. Quit making stuff up. MacPaint was demonstrated ON STAGE! "

Because I saw them draw line art with MacPaint on stage with equivalent steadiness and fineness and have done it myself. It does not require being done "pixel-by-pixel" as you claimed when the computer can easily do it with the freehand tool.

The point still remains that it could be done freehand to that degree in 1984.

It does not require being done "pixel-by-pixel" as you claimed when the computer can easily do it with the freehand tool.

LOL, this is madness. There WAS NO FREEHAND TOOL when the "hello" was created, because there WAS NO MACPAINT YET.

That does not mean that MacPant was never created. That does not mean that when MacPaint was created, that it did not have a freehand tool. That does not mean that "hello" couldn't be drawn freehand in MacPaint in 1984 when you bought it.

It JUST means that when the original "hello" graphic was created, it WASN'T created with the freehand tool in MacPaint, because THERE WASN'T A MACPAINT YET.

So it was made on a Lisa. Pixel by pixel, in what could be called MacPaint 0.1.

I'm going to sleep now. And when I log back on, I won't be addressing this issue anymore.

Relax, FRiend Swordmaker! Believe me, I understand your defensiveness -- but, in this case, it appears to me that, on this one, you and Talisker are on the same side -- so you can dial it back a bit...

You both succeeded in blowing Blue Highway's dumb@$$3d

"there’s no way that screen image of the graphics program that spelled out hello was able to do that in 1984. Way too smooth and no pixels. It was photoshopped even though Adobe’s Photoshop didn’t arrive until 1990."

out of the water. And, Talisker did us all a favor by providing some intriguing history on how the Mac came to have that exact graphic capability (and intro image) in 1984.

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FWIW, in my "museum", I still have a working 128K Mac in its original shipping case and with the original Applewriter (not Applewriter II) packed on top -- just as it shipped. (But, I bought it after it was "retired"...) LOL! The disk-swapping required to get anything done is horrendous!

Now, on my MBP, I run NINE (9) desktops (with multiple apps running on each) -- simultaneously!

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I assure you that I can replicate that "hello" on the 128K Mac -- freehand -- with the mouse.

In 1984, I was still a full-bore Apple ][ "hacker", (in the original, good, meaning) -- happily writing Applesoft BASIC code "boosted" with "CALL-"ed "fast" hex subroutines I wrote in the built-in mini-assembler -- or "borrowed" from the ROM.

Then, a colleague let me take his month-old Mac home for the weekend to share it (and MacPaint) with my kids -- and, they had a ball, using the mouse to "write" in longhand on the screen.

As an example of MacPaint's intuitive nature, I was using the eraser tool to "scrub away" a large rectangle, when my 10-year old daughter said,

"Dad, couldn't you just grab a big chunk of the white background -- and drag it over on top of what you want to erase?"

And -- just to blow Blue Highway's idiocy out of the water -- here's that famous 1984 MacPaint image of the oriental lady:

Even we who used it tend to forget that MacPaint was binary bit-mapped -- (B&W) -- and "grayscales" were simulated by using one of the pre-programmed B&W "textures" or "patterns"...

BTW, 'the built-in display was a one-bit black-and-white, 9 in (23 cm) CRT with a fixed resolution of 512×342 pixels, establishing the desktop publishing standard of 72 PPI'.

(Lest we forget -- for many years, 72 PPI was the "standard" resolution for WWW graphics...)