Sources for Bill Atkinson's works at Apple?

Question

In Peter Seibel's "Coders at Work", Donald Knuth says:

Bill Atkinson’s programs are now publicly available thanks to Apple and it won’t be too long before we’ll be able to read that. That’s well-documented code with lots of pioneering graphics algorithms in it.

Does anyone know any more about this? I'm having trouble finding anything through Google.

Answer 1

Looks like it's here:

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/X2948.2005

Answer 2

I'm guessing this is in reference to the source code of MacPaint, which Apple and/or Bill Atkinson and/or other parties have donated to the Computer History Museum in 2005.

By searching online, I found a few bits of trivia:

The original MacPaint consisted of 5,804 lines of Pascal source code,
augmented by another 2,738 lines of 68000 assembly language

It appears that the full source code, in digital form is still not published at this time. The museum, merely has physical artefacts such as rims of computer print-out, notebooks and such. According to a wiki note to this page on MacPaint evolution, the museum has not received the intellectual property rights associated with this, and therefore hasn't felt authorized to release the code in full, even for research purposes.

At this time, the interest for this code is probably more driven by historical / epistemological purposes than for the its potential reuse, even partial, in new software.

Answer 3

They are "finally" now available from The Computer History Museum. Here is the page for the MacPaint and QuickDraw source code:

http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/