Developed by: ZSoft Corporation
Launched: 1984

PC Paintbrush was a graphics editing program created by ZSoft Corporation in 1984 for computers with the MS-DOS operating system.

It was originally developed as a response to the first paintbrush program for the IBM PC, PCPaint, which had been released the previous year by Mouse Systems, the company responsible for bringing the mouse to the IBM PC for the first time.

By 1984, Mouse Systems had released PCPaint to compete with Apple Paint on the Apple II computer and was already positioned to compete with MacPaint on Apple Computer's new Macintosh platform. Unlike MacPaint, PCPaint allowed users to work in color.

By the time Paintbrush was released the following year, PCPaint had already added 16-color support for the PC's 64-color Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), and Paintbrush continued to enjoy the PC's advantage of also supporting EGA. (The EGA supported 64 colors, of which 16 could be on screen at once in normal use.)

Also following in the footsteps of Mouse Systems and PCPaint, one of the first PC programs to use a mouse pointing device, the first versions of Paintbrush were distributed by Microsoft, including a mouse. Both Microsoft and its competitor, Mouse Systems, bundled their mice with Mouse Systems' PCPaint in 1984. By Christmas 1984, amid record sales in the home computer market, Microsoft had created a "sidecar" package for the PCjr,[2] complete with its mouse, but featuring its competitor's product, PCPaint. With the release of Paintbrush the following year, Microsoft no longer needed to sell its competitor's software in the PC mouse hardware market to maintain the same market advantage.

Microsoft's mechanical mice outsold Mouse Systems' optical mice within a few years, but PCPaint outsold Paintbrush until the late 1980s.

Unlike most applications before and after, Paintbrush version numbers were recorded using Roman numerals.

Along with the release of Paintbrush, ZSoft, following in the footsteps of PCPaint's Pictor PIC format, the first popular image format for PCs, created the PCX image format.

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