Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Mac History

The Computer History Museum has an article (and the source code) for MacPaint and QuickDraw up on their site.

Looking at the pictures, I can't help but feel a little old knowing that the artwork I did on the Apple Macintosh computer back then wasn't in fact the first computer I worked on professionally. The first professional computer art I did was on the Commodore 64, but it couldn't have been too much farther back than the Mac stuff. I've always listed my computer career as starting in 1985 but I had been going to "The Computer Learning Center for Children," which was also the home of the newly created "Unicorn Software," for a little while before they asked me to do some work for them. Trying to match my memories of how long they were in their original offices before moving to the new building, how that matches up with me spending my senior year of high school (Class of '86) in California, etc.

I had thought that once I got back from California, summer of 1986, that I had only done Amiga and Atari ST work for Unicorn before going to Westwood in 1988. But now that I really think about it, not only do I remember doing a few things on the Mac, but I also did several more titles on the Apple II.

Trying to look for a picture from one of the Mac games I drew on MacPaint I found it funny how back then every program for the Mac had to be named MacWhatever (MacPaint, MacRobots, MacEtc and so on) just like when the iPod/iPhone first launched and everybody was naming their Apps iThis and iThat.

I also found this page that appears to be some sort of Unicorn Software holding page. I've never seen that slogan before, that wasn't their logo, and although I have no idea when the company shut down they were publishing games before 1986.

Anyway, I didn't find anything that I hadn't posted before. So if you really want to see a picture, use the blog's search feature and look for "Unicorn software."