Want to see something nifty?

MacPaint

All computer programs are written in a programming language. There are many different types of language, and the're all an attempt to make it easier to give the computer instructions. In other words, instead of having to program in the actual ones and zeros that a machine understands, we would use a programming language that was closer to our own in terms of syntax and structure to tell it what we wanted it to do.

Over time, different languages were developed to make the process easier; Assembly, Fortran, BASIC,  COBOL, C, and that's just to name a few. Many of these languages evolve into similar yet more functional versions (for example, C evolved into C++ which further evolved into C#).

Of course, a computer doesn't understand any programming language, it only understands machine language; the ones and zeros of its circuits. So once a program is written, it has to be 'compiled' into machine language by a compiler, or in the case of assembly language, an assembler.

In case you have ever wondered what programming actually looks like, there are many resources online that can not only show you, but teach you! However, I thought you might be interested to see this page about Mac Paint and Quick Draw at the website of the Computer History Museum (I don't know if I need to disclose that I'm a member, but I am).

What's fascinating about this page isn't just the history of these programs, which is actually very interesting, but also that it provides a link to the actual source code used to create them - so the lines the programmer typed in to create those programs can be downloaded from that very page. If for whatever reason you have trouble, I have hotlinked them here. They are written in assembler, which was normally platform specific, meaning a program written in that language couldn't be used on any other system.

They are in a zip file because there are 5 different programs that create the single experience of running Mac Paint. In order to view them properly, you will need to right click on one of the programs from the zip file, choose 'open with' from the menu that appears, and view it in a text editor such as Notepad (in Windows) or TextEdit (on the Mac).

It's amazing to think that just by typing in lines, the result could be something as advanced, for its time anyway, as Mac Paint.