Software Gems: The Computer History Museum Historical Source Code Series
By the mid-1980s, mass-produced personal computers had finally become powerful enough to be used for graphics. Apple had released their drawing program MacPaint 5 with the first Macintosh in 1984. But at 2500ドル the Mac was expensive, and it only displayed black and white images.
The splash screen for Deluxe Paint.
The Commodore Amiga, introduced the next year, cost half as much 2, and it had color. But although it came with a sophisticated operating system, there were no bundled graphics applications. That opened the door for other software companies, and some jumped right in.
Dan Silva created DeluxePaint in 1985 at Electronic Arts, a then 3-year-old publisher of computer games. The initial goal was to write an internal graphics design program, called "Prism", for creating game artwork at EA. But it quickly became clear that it was a general-purpose design tool that might have broad appeal outside of EA. The first version of what became called DeluxePaint was released at the same time as the Amiga at the end of 1985 at an introductory price of 79ドル.95, and was sold later for 99ドル.95.
The disk for DeluxePaint on the Amiga. Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
It was a hit. A review in the April 1986 issue of "Compute!" magazine 4 called DeluxePaint "a visual arts program of immense scope and flexibility... Virtually anything that anyone ever wanted in a personal computer graphics program is included in DeluxePaint — and it’s all easy to use and easy to learn."
DeluxePaint became the standard graphics editor for the Amiga, and it rode the wave of Amiga’s success.
We have found both the manual 6 and the reference card 7 for DeluxePaint version 1. To see how the program began to evolve, check out the manual for DeluxePaint version II 1.
Video: A tutorial on the use of DeluxePaint III from 1989, which also contains clips of Dan Silva talking about its history and new features
With the permission of Electronic Arts, Inc. the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1986 version I of DeluxePaint. There are 89 files of C language source, comprising almost 17,000 lines of code in about 474 KB of text.
To download the code you must agree to the terms of the license, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.
If you would like to support the Computer History Museum’s efforts to preserve and publish historic source code like this, please consider making a voluntary contribution.
In a video interview for a later version of Deluxe Paint, author Dan Silva describes the path to his interest in graphics starting in the 1960s.
Dan Silva, ca. 1986.
In 1978 Dan worked for Xerox doing user interface design for the Xerox Star computer. Then he spent a year at the newly-formed computer group at Lucasfilm, where he designed a video editor. He returned to Xerox, where he worked with Bill Bowman to create a black and white paint program called Doodle for the Xerox Dandelion computer.
By the time he joined Electronic Arts in 1983, Dan had a clear idea of how the ideal paint program should behave. Like most programs that are plowing new ground, DeluxePaint started out modestly.
The released version had a menu system, but still allowed simultaneous keyboard commands, which was a productivity feature for power users.
A German manual for DeluxePaint II.
Although Silva wrote most of the original code, there were also contributions from Jerry Morrison and Steve Shaw for routines that transferred bitmaps to and from "interleaved bit map" (.LMB) files on the disk, and from Gordon Knopes for some of the early color pixel processing.
Although MacPaint was released before DeluxePaint, there was little connection. Silva says, "I had developed most of the underlying functionality before I saw MacPaint, but I thought it was pretty cool. I think the positioning of the menu icons on the right side was probably influenced by MacPaint."
Like most products with a long lifetime, DeluxePaint started out simple and became increasing more powerful and more complex to use. On June 27, 1989, Dan Silva appeared on Stewart Cheifet’s "Computer Chronicles" TV show [3] to talk about the upcoming release of DeluxePaint III, which added features to create animations.
Versions of DeluxePaint were eventually created for PCs running MS-DOS, for the Atari ST, and for the Apple IIGS. There were manuals and books about it in various languages, including German. The last version for the Amiga, version V, was released in 1994.
DeluxePaint was a good program with a good long run.
We appreciate the help of:
Len Shustek is the founding chairman emeritus of the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum.
In 1979, he co-founded Nestar Systems, an early developer of networks for personal computers. In 1986, he cofounded Network General, a manufacturer of network analysis tools including The SnifferTM. The company became Network Associates after merging with McAfee Associates and PGP. He has taught Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon and Stanford Universities, and was a founder of the "angel financing" firm VenCraft. He has served on various for-profit and non-profit boards, including the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, which is now the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Shustek has a BS and MS in Physics from the Polytechnic Institute, and an MS and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.
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