The QuickDraw graphics library stands to this day as testament to the original Macintosh computer and its creators. The library was the fundamental technology that made the original Macintosh graphical user interface possible. QuickDraw was brought to life by the ingenuity and skill of software designers such as Bill Atkinson and Andy Herzfeld. Apple created QuickDraw in the late 1970’s and early 1980s, an era in which “real” computer graphics were the province of large, powerful mainframe computers, and personal computers were just making the transition from novelty to necessity.

QuickDraw had very modest beginnings. In various forms, the original code ran on computers like the Apple Lisa and the original Macintosh. The high resolution bitmapped displays of these computers was considered a revolution when compared to the character terminals of the previous computer generation. In spite of their sophistication, however, the computers could only display graphics in black and white.

QuickDraw was flexible enough to produce impressive graphics on both the screen and on printer. The library incorporated a number of revolutionary advances, features that were not found on personal computers prior to the Macintosh. Among these were the support for pixel regions, drawing operations that could be recorded into a meta-file (the infamous PICT file format), the ability to scale the drawings in a meta-file on playback, and drawing primitives for ovals, curves, and rounded rectangles.

Apple evolved QuickDraw along with its computers. As displays became capable of reproducing millions of colors and two tone dot-matrix printers evolved into high-resolution, photo quality ink jet printers, QuickDraw both kept up the pace and pushed the envelope of graphics evolution. The era of QuickDraw ended, however, when Apple deprecated the technology in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The QuickDraw library came of age as an important building block for vital graphics technologies like QuickTime and ColorSync. Along the way it not only served the graphics industry, but also took a hand in shaping it.

QuickDraw was not the only technology born in 1984 to have a profound impact both the graphics industry and the Mac OS X platform. In the same year, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock incorporated a new company, Adobe Systems Inc. Adobe released the first version of their PostScript graphics system that same year.

PostScript was unusual because of the device independence inherit in the system. A PostScript program could send the same drawing commands to two printers with very different capabilities, and both would reproduce the same graphic to the best of their abilities. One printer might draw the graphic with a low resolution and in black and white, while the same program on another printer might generate a high-resolution color image. This was in stark contrast to the fixed resolution, device dependent nature of QuickDraw and other graphics libraries.

The paths of QuickDraw and PostScript were destined to converge. Apple and Adobe brought these two technologies together when they developed the LaserWriter printer. In spite of the fact that QuickDraw had one drawing model, and PostScript a completely different one, application developers combined the on-screen drawing with QuickDraw and the printing might of PostScript. This synthesis led to the creation of creative applications such as Aldus Page-Maker and Adobe Illustrator. Applications like these freed document editors from the proprietary typesetting systems that had dominated the industry. The Desktop Publishing revolution had arrived.