: sigh :
I never said that. Nor did I imply it. I actually had an original 128K Mac in January, 1984, with original release software, with which I recreated "hello" myself many times.
In fact, that was my point in my reply to Blue Highway, that not only was it possible in 1984, it was actually done in 1983.
Also the in-house design artist, Susan Kare, was one of the first people to get a working Mac, because she developed ALL of the visual interface, literally creating the fonts and icons pixel by pixel. And the creator of MacPaint, Bill Atkinson, worked closely with her, because she used the program so intensely she became his beta tester. As a result MacPaint was one of the most stable initial release programs, even more than the Finder.
But all of the initial release graphics were done in 1983, of practical necessity alongside the development of the Mac hardware and software, and with that same hardware and software as it approached release status (which frankly was still beta, but they were out of time). And so, while the Mac was used as often as possible, sometimes if only to test functionality, as well as MacPaint, sometimes that functionality required MANY redoes from lost crashed work, and yes, even after initial tool use, pixel by pixel creation (which turned into the pencil tool), as well as the paintbrush tool.
Enough.
My apologies, Talisker. Perhaps I misinterpreted your response about the drawing, essentially seeming to say it had been faked in 1983 as a pixel-by-pixel construct, instead of being an everyday capability of the original Mac, which is what Blue Highway was challenging. Such pixel-by-pixel constructs had been around for years prior to 1983. . . where a flowing stroke drawing was a new creation for a computer to accomplish both in 1983 and 1984. Both of us were trying to stress that functionality.