Today is Painter’s 30th birthday!

At 10:00 AM on August 6, 1991 in Boston, Massachusetts, Fractal Design Painter made its public debut at Macworld. The Macworld Exposition was so big—it was the largest annual convention/trade show in Boston—that it required the use of two buildings. If you wanted to savor trade show glitz and glamour, you went to the immense and plush Building 1. 

If, on the other hand, you wanted to see innovative products created by shoestring-budget start-up companies, you went to the dimly lit and claustrophobic Building 2. It may have been in the boondocks, but Building 2 was where the true technological action was to be found. Near the back of Building 2, in a non-descript 10x10 Wacom booth, Fractal Design, at Wacom’s invitation, debuted Painter to the world.

The company I worked for, Time Arts (Santa Rosa, CA), had recently introduced Oasis, a painting application that extensively utilized the Wacom pen’s pressure sensitivity. Time Arts, being another small start-up company, also demoed as guests in the Wacom booth. This situation gave me the opportunity to jealously admire—up close and personal—Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges’ latest software creation (Mark and Tom had previously written ImageStudio and ColorStudio for Letraset).

Technology moves at such an accelerated pace that it is hard to fully describe the pure exhilaration that accompanied seeing a truly groundbreaking application for the first time. For me, it represented the writing on the wall: Oasis was not to become a software classic. That honor was destined for Painter. 

As the Mac faithful made their way through Macworld that summer, they eventually happened upon the Wacom booth. What was this? Here was a large crowd filling the aisles around the booth and spilling into the surrounding vendor’s paid space, much to their chagrin. Jostling through the entranced throng, one would come eyeballs-to-monitor with Painter. 

There was Mark Zimmer, sketching away on a Wacom tablet—which was new enough that many attendees didn’t have a clue as to what it was or what it was capable of—and creating on the monitor what appeared to be traditional pencil sketches, crayon drawings, and oil paintings.

For the computer graphic aficionado, this was an epiphany. For the general public, it was science fiction.

And within 6 months, I was at Fractal Design working with Mark and Tom.