While it’s not clear if that particular program came equipped with its own image library, the same company began producing and selling groups of bitmap images under a new name: ClickArt. Not long after that, however, the T/Maker Company collaborated with Apple to develop another word processing program, WriteNow. As the story goes, they were the only two applications pre-installed on this historic Macintosh 128K.īut what made MacPaint so important was its role as the first program that allowed users to manipulate bitmap images: The “simple line art,” according to The Atlantic, that comprised “early electronic clip art.” Source: DigiBarn That’s partially due to the 1984 development of MacPaint, which was released alongside Apple’s word processing program, MacWrite.
#Add clip art in word for mac software#
But the $400 software didn’t come with these image libraries - instead, they were available on separate floppy disks that had to be purchased for $90 each.īut despite this seemingly trailblazing effort on behalf of IBM, it was really Apple who may have emerged as a leader in the digital image space, at least around the early-to-mid 1980s.
Think of it as a primitive version of PowerPoint. That was made possible by a program called VCN ExecuVision, a presentation program created in 1983 for IBM personal computers. It all began with the idea to create a digital library of images. The History of Clip Art The 1980s Source: Computer History Museum But where did clip art come from, anyway? Today, we’re honoring its legacy with a trip through time. That’s an important distinction - clip art isn’t limited to Microsoft, and actually had several predecessors before it found its way into the likes of Word and PowerPoint.Īnd maybe its retirement was for the best - when I think back to some of its more popular images, they would look positively antiquated today. Clip art opened up a whole new world of visuals for academic assignments - not to mention, the newsletters that my childhood, future-writer self liked to put together for fun.īut today, clip art has become a bit of a thing of the past, at least since Microsoft retired its version in 2014. When I was in school, the only way to include a picture in a book report, for example, was with enough luck to find what I was looking for in a magazine. Today, it’s hard to imagine a world where you can’t procure an image just by searching for it online.
Not only were you likely to have the coolest games, but also, you probably had access to clip art libraries, which made for hours of entertainment - for me, at least. If you had an Apple, or even a computer with Windows, your house was the place to be. When I was growing up, it was a pretty big deal to have a computer with an operating system other than DOS.
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