MacDraw

~ the obit ~

i missed macdraw. wrong age and wrong region, it shipped the year i was born and the macintosh barely made it to turkey across the entire eighties decade. when i started using computers around '92 or '93 the school lab was msdos machines with logo turtles and the basic prompt, the macs were on the other side of a magazine article and an exchange rate. by '95 we had a 386 at home running win 3.1 and i did vector work in corel draw, not anything from apple. macdraw existed somewhere in that gap.

mark cutter built the program based on his earlier lisadraw work on the apple lisa, the failed predecessor that almost nobody outside us companies bought (close enough). the lisa machine got pulled from sale in 1986 but cutter's vector engine had already been ported across to the macintosh. the original 1984 macdraw was as minimal as macpaint, mostly because it had to fit in the same 128k of ram with the operating system underneath. for whatever reason, that constraint produced a very tight wysiwyg object model that survived through every later rewrite of the program.

macdraw ii in 1988 was a complete rewrite, this time for the macintosh ii color hardware that had shipped in 1987. the new version added color objects plus the kinda layering controls a real desktop-publishing user wanted by then. macdraw pro in 1991 caught up with the postscript laser-printer era, by then claris had taken the product off apple's hands and was running it as a commercial app rather than a bundled tool.

when illustrator landed on the mac in '87 it became the high-end pick almost immediately and the rest of the decade was macdraw's slow fall behind. claris merged macdraw pro and clarisworks's draw module into clarisdraw whose last release 1.0v4 shipped in 1994. honestly the brand limped along under apple's reshuffling of claris through the next three years. when apple folded claris back into the parent company in 1997 macdraw was retired with no successor product under the name.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

macdraw was the bundled vector half of the original macintosh, the program apple gave you when macpaint's bitmap was the wrong tool for the job. honestly the wysiwyg model meant every shape you drew remained editable as an object after the fact, you could resize a rectangle or rotate a polygon a week later because the file stored geometry rather than pixels. that was a new idea on a consumer machine in 1984, postscript existed but only on laserwriter hardware that no household owned.

~ the claris years ~

claris was apple's wholly-owned subsidiary for consumer software, spun out in 1987 to give the parent company a clearer relationship with the third-party developer market. macdraw moved across to claris alongside macwrite and macpaint, the bundle apple had built but no longer wanted to maintain in-house. honestly, claris ran the line on its own commercial pricing through 1988 to 1991, with macdraw ii as the flagship vector product. macdraw pro in 1991 was the postscript-aware update and clarisdraw in 1993 was the consolidation that retired both macdraw pro and clarisworks's draw module under one name.

~ what survived ~

mark cutter went on to build other vector tools after macdraw, none with the same bundling reach. the wysiwyg object model survived in canvas-and-illustrator clones across the rest of the decade, omnigraffle on later mac os used to advertise its compatibility with old macdraw files as a feature. the macdraw.drw format is still readable in a few archival converters, mostly through the lisaem and minivmac emulator scene where people open original 1984 disk images to see what cutter shipped. apple has not revived the brand and there is no successor product under the same name.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »