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I think it's a bit looser of analogy, where MacPaint was one of the first desktop computing apps people saw and immediately realized how much better than the ol

by tdicola 12y ago

I think it's a bit looser of analogy, where MacPaint was one of the first desktop computing apps people saw and immediately realized how much better than the old command line tools something could be. Word processors, spreadsheets, etc. worked fine with all text but MacPaint was truly special and couldn't be replicated without a full desktop environment. From what I gather in the article they want to do something similar where they build a product that makes people realize 'oh so THAT's what I can do with all this Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, etc. tech!'

Someone 12y ago
The mouse was a must for MacPaint, but it didn't run in a 'full desktop environment' at all. It blitted something looking like a window onto the screen. If it used the OS for doing that, that only was because it took up less memory that way, not because it wanted to behave like it ran on a desktop environment. Did it have movable windows? No. Did it have resizable windows? No. Could you move the tool palette around? No. Could you open multiple windows? No (no surprise, given that a full-page painting took a whopping 28kB or so and the OS didn't really have enough RAM to store that.)