The Computer History Museum announced today that the original source code for Electronic Arts (EA) DeluxePaint, a graphical drawing program for the Commodore Amiga, has been preserved and is available on the Museum's website.
This first version of DeluxePaint was created by Dan Silva for the Amiga 1000 and released by EA in November of 1985. It had begun as a graphics design program called “Prism” for creating game artwork within EA, but it quickly became clear that it was a general-purpose design tool that would have broad appeal to a larger audience.
The Commodore Amiga was far less expensive than the competing Apple Macintosh, and it supported color graphics. The $99 DeluxePaint application was a big hit, and it became the standard graphics editor for the Amiga and rode the wave of the Amiga's success.
”It's amazing that such a sophisticated graphics program could be written for such a relatively primitive machine,” said Len Shustek, Museum chairman of the board of trustees. “The base machine had just 256 kilobytes of memory and a single floppy disk. The code is a marvel of succinctness.”
With the permission of Electronic Arts, Inc. the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to version I of DeluxePaint. There are 89 files of C language source, comprising nearly 17,000 lines of code in about 474 KB of text.
For download options and more information about the release of this historic source code, please visit: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/electronic-arts-deluxepaint-early-source-code/
The Computer History Museum has the world's most diverse archive of software and related material. The stories of software's origins and impact on the world provide inspiration and lessons for the future to global audiences—including young coders and entrepreneurs. For other releases in the Museum's historic source code series, please see: APPLE II DOS, IBM APL, Apple MacPaint and QuickDraw, Adobe Photoshop, Xerox Alto, Early CP/M, Microsoft Word for Windows Version 1.1, and MS-DOS.
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is a nonprofit organization with a four-decade history as the world's leading institution exploring the history of computing and its ongoing impact on society. The Museum is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computer history and is home to the largest international collection of computing artifacts in the world, encompassing computer hardware, software, documentation, ephemera, photographs, and moving images.
The Museum brings computer history to life through large-scale exhibits, an acclaimed speaker series, a dynamic website, docent-led tours, and an award-winning education program. The Museum's signature exhibition is “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing,” described by USA Today as “the Valley's answer to the Smithsonian.” Other current exhibits include “Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2”, “IBM 1401 and PDP-1 Demo Labs”, and “Where To? A History of Autonomous Vehicles”. The Museum's IBM 1401 Demo Lab and PDP-1 Demo Lab offer visitors a glimpse into the past, an extraordinary opportunity to experience historic systems at work.
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