[TXnMA]

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...)

[Swordmaker]

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!

Oh, yes, I do recall. That's why the very first purchase most Macintosh 128K buyers made was for the additional external floppy drive which eliminated most of the disk swapping required to do anything.

My disagreement with Talisker was his apparent agreement with the statement that the Mac couldn't do that simple "Hello" at introduction when I knew very well that it easily could, having done that and more, although at the time I was not a Mac user. I was programing an Apple II and later I was a Commodore Amiga user where I ran a virtual Mac which ran faster in emulation than a real Mac ran on hardware.

I have no disagreement with Talisker that MacPaint was developed on the Lisa, which also ran on a Motorola 68000 processor. . . but my point was that the Mac itself was perfectly capable of accomplishing the same graphical capability by the time it was introduced in early 1984, regardless of the nit-picking issue he was supporting Blue Highway's point with by saying it was built pixel-by-pixel. Even on the Lisa, Apple had a program that could already do that drawing called LisaSketch which was also written by Bill Atkinson.

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

I have run that many different OPERATING SYSTEMS in different desktops on my main MacPro — simultaneously! There was some guy last year that ran 26!