Gone were the bitmapped checkerboard patterns of Windows Paint – replaced with hues produced by mixing 256 values each of red, green, and blue.”įor many urban Indians growing up in the ’90s, Microsoft Paintbrush was the go-to for basic cut-copy-paste jobs, adding texts, creating funny doodles, testing their handwriting using a mouse, creating portraits of their favourite superhero.
The largest change, however, was that the program now worked with color. The shape tools fell from 12 to 8, and the bezier curve tool now required two control points (making ‘S’ curves possible). The ‘brush’ tool remained, the ‘pencil’ disappeared, the ‘paint can’ became a ‘paint roller’.
And so it was that Microsoft Paintbrush became virtually every urban Indian child’s first digital painting canvas.Īlso read: Planet M - brand that changed how Indians experienced music in new millenniumĭavison writes on the changes from the original: “The tool palette moved to the left edge of the screen, and the color palette stretched across the bottom. Then, before the turn of the millennium, internet, email services and messenger services had also taken root, and Indian children, were, for the first time, truly growing up with computers. This meant that for almost two decades, Microsoft Paintbrush was effectively the last word in paint software in India, especially given other historic changes taking place.īy the mid-90s, economic reforms had been ushered in and households across India had slowly started to acquire basic desktops. But it was updated with the introduction of Windows 3.0 in 1990, and that version, called Microsoft Paintbrush, remained the standard for the next several years.Įven the Windows 95 update didn’t involve significant changes for Paintbrush (barring the name, which was changed to Paint), and the next big change really only came in 2007, with the launch of Windows Vista. The original MS Paint, called Windows Paint, was launched with Windows 1.0 in 1985. The term MS Paint doesn’t actually refer to any one single software but is generic shorthand for “whichever bitmap-based graphics programme is standard with the current Windows operating system,” writes media historian Patrick Davison in Journal of Visual Culture. Raise your hands if you remember moving your cursor over a dark grey toolbox to the left of the screen of your heavy desktop, and then using a virtual pencil, paintbrush or spray can to magically create art out of splashes and streaks across a digital canvas.
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