PCPaint
Launched: 1984
Innovation: PCPaint was the first PC drawing program that used a mouse.
PCPaint was the first mouse-based graphical drawing program for the IBM PC.
It was developed by John Bridges and Doug Wolfgram.
It later became Pictor Paint.
Hardware manufacturer Mouse Systems included PCPaint in millions of mice it sold, making PCPaint the best-selling DOS-based drawing program of the late 1980s.
At the dawn of the IBM PC era in 1981, Doug Wolfgram purchased a Microsoft mouse and decided to write a drawing program for it. The interface was primitive, but the program worked well. In February 1983, Wolfgram traveled to SoftCon in New Orleans, where he demonstrated the program to Mouse Systems. Mouse Systems was developing an optical mouse and wanted to include a painting program, so they agreed to include MouseDraw. The original program was written entirely in assembly language with primitive graphics routines developed by Wolfgram.
In 1982, John Bridges was working for an educational software company, Classroom Consortia Media, Inc., developing and writing Apple and IBM graphics libraries for CCM software. Bridges and Wolfgram were friends who had connected through a bulletin board system developed and operated by Wolfgram. The two collaborated through the BBS, Wolfram in California and Bridges in New York.
At the time, Apple was working intensively on its new computer, the Macintosh, and Mouse Systems wanted the new painting program to have the look and feel of MacPaint. Wolfgram contacted Bridges, and the two agreed to develop the commercial version of PCPaint, as Mouse Systems would call it. John Bridges and Doug Wolfgram began transforming MouseDraw into what became the first commercial GUI painting program for the PC. The program was completely rewritten using Bridge's graphics library, and the higher-level elements were written in C instead of assembly language. Bridges developed the basic graphics code for the first version of PCPaint, while Wolfgram worked on the user interface and high-level code. Mouse Systems signed an exclusive agreement with Wolfgram's company, Microtex Industries, Inc., to include PCPaint in every mouse they sold.
In early 1987, Mouse Systems decided that Paint programs were no longer helping sell mice, so it discontinued the package agreement and returned the rights to the code to MicroTex Industries, but retained the rights to the name, PCPaint. Wolfgram then combined the paint program with a new animation system it was developing (called GRASP), and Paul Mace Software bought the publishing rights to the animation system and PCPaint, which would later be called Pictor. Bridges became involved again and assumed programming responsibilities for GRASP and PCPaint, while Wolfgram focused more on the commercial details.
To create the first version of PCPaint, Doug had a dual-floppy disk machine with a Computer Innovations compiler on one disk and the source code on the other. John had the luxury of a 10 MB hard drive in his XT. Data was exchanged daily via 1200 and later 2400 baud modems.
