PCPaint

PCPaint was the first IBM PC-based mouse-driven GUI paint program. It was developed by John Bridges and Doug Wolfgram. It was later developed into Pictor Paint.

The hardware manufacturer Mouse Systems bundled PCPaint with millions of computer mice that they sold, making PCPaint also the best-selling MS-DOS-based paint program of the late 1980s.

Background

During the dawn of the IBM-PC age in 1981, Doug Wolfgram purchased a Microsoft Mouse and decided to write a drawing program for it. The interface was primitive but the program functioned well. In February 1983, Wolfgram traveled to SoftCon in New Orleans where he demonstrated the program to Mouse Systems. Mouse Systems was developing an optical mouse and they wanted to bundle a painting program so they agreed to bundle in Mouse Draw. The original program was written entirely in Assembly language with primitive graphics routines developed by Wolfgram.

In 1982 John Bridges worked for an educational software company, Classroom Consortia Media, Inc., developing and writing Apple and IBM graphics libraries for CCM's software. Bridges and Wolfgram were friends who had been connected through a bulletin board system developed and run by Wolfgram. The two collaborated cross country via the BBS, Wolfram in California and Bridges in New York.