This was a fun article I just ran across at Business Week:
I used Mac Paint on the Mac Plus and I would definitely call it revolutionary. Yes the Amiga, and several others, came out with competing or better products, however, for me in a new Mac world coming from the IBM PC clone world this was amazing.
And, in contrast to one commenter who said it was a neat demo and nothing more, we used this in our desktop publishing all the time. We could finally create and manipulate graphics and logos for newsletters, business cards, etc. For a small business it really made us stand out. Hardly anyone in the mid-80’s had this capability for so cheap. It usually required a large print house with expensive machines. Now we could put a real professional touch on customer documents. B/W art was definitely used on probably 90% of print output at the time so having a color capable utility didn’t offer much when it came to a hard copy. MacPaint really allowed us to push the boundaries. With a Mac SE/30 and an Apple LaserWriter II we were producing high quality professional documents for clients for less than $7,000 in the late ’80s, which at the time was simply amazing.
I’m sure others out there could have done something similar with Amigas, PCs, etc, but for us this was a game changer. 🙂
I love seeing recaps on older history like this, for any company, not just Apple.