The Origin Story of Kid Pix

The lack of experience in a child can lead to some funny situations. I want to say this happened in first grade or so, had a teacher, Mr Macintosh, who had several of his own Mac computers available in his classroom, and Kid Pix was loaded up on them (amongst other classics of the time). I was obsessed, particularly with the Bomb, thought it was just the coolest way to clear the screen, this ostensibly serious concept of a program made fun.

I also had difficulty connecting with my classmates, combination of untreated ADHD, and issues at home. For some reason I got it into my head that the bomb was cool, so if I told the others I had a bomb in my backpack I'd be cool! This was very shortly after the Columbine massacre, and of course the policy at that moment was to immediately call in the police. They talked with me, impressed upon my young mind the seriousness of such claims, and we all thankfully just moved on.

Odd to think back on now.

Kid Pix was the very first program I ever used on a computer when I was around 5 years old. Good times. Still remember the dynamite.

FYI there is an iOS port of KidPix that my kids throughly enjoy as much as I enjoyed playing it at that age.

I set up an old Mac Mini G4 with a patched version of Mac OS 9 with the sole purpose of allowing my 3 year old son to play point and click games, Kid Pix being one of them.

Oh man, what a throw back. The bomb to clear the screen was something else. In later versions they had a slideshow thingy, similar to hypercard.

This (along with Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego) were the things to use at my school.

I had no idea we had basically the first commercial version but the timing lines up.

As an adult I now feel for those teachers who had to hear a whole bunch of computers making constant sound effects though.

I think my elementary school had Kid Pix 1.0 when I was in kindergarten, but they upgraded to Kid Pix Deluxe 3 pretty early on, and I ended up convincing my parents to buy a copy of that on DVD, which I still have. The bright, glossy colors and sound effects from that version are what I remember the most.

(I actually spent a lot of time just sitting on our home computer browsing the webpage for a Mac-only "3X" edition[1], which had a fire extinguisher instead of the bomb, among other minor differences. But one day, we got a mysterious email making an offer of the normal version for Windows on sale. In hindsight, I have no idea where that email came from, and it's a small wonder my parents didn't get scammed buying through it.)

[1] https://www.mackiev.com/kp_big_screen.html

According to its wiki page, it's still under active development by Software MacKiev since 2004 (Kid Pix Deluxe 3), with Hickman serving as a consultant since 2011:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClB2DbKHElM Entertaining video from Dank Pods using Kid Pix on Windows, with lots of the sound and visual effects

S.F.'s California Academy of Sciences used to have an open room near the lobby with a ton of Macintoshes loaded with children's software. I always remembered trying out Kid Pix.

The UI really was easy to use like the article says. Part of this was there were so many fun options that we put extra effort into understanding the menus.

I’m sure we had kid pix studio for windows, may have come bundled with something like a graphics card. Definitely unusual, although I don’t remember my kids engaging with it as there were a lot of other kid oriented programs when the whole multimedia PC was in vogue. Hard to compete with Reader Rabbit. Great story though.

Oh man, Kid Pix takes me back. That was my very first interaction with a Mac back in 2nd grade in my school's computer lab. It was definitely the favorite app amongst all the students back then, and a helluva improved experience over using the old Apple IIs we had access to prior.

Essay is from 2013, been shared on HN before but not much discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fred-green-blue.com%2F...

I didn’t know about this program and am obsessed. Truly a case of creative constraints makes for exciting solutions. I am so excited to play around with this more (2 illustrations for an article down, 2 to go!)

I remember playing Kid Pix on Windows as a kid. Back then, many programs required you to switch to 256-color mode and wouldn't run unless you did. But somehow, Kid Pix would still let you use it without having to switch modes.

Took Prof Hickman's Digital Arts class when I was at UofO. Just a truly awesome human being.

And Prof Hickman, if for some reason you are on HN and reading this, thanks for giving me access to the Apollo Domain workstation.

What a paradigm shift it was when us kids in the computer lab found out you can change the stamp size/stop the animations with shift, command, opt etc

So much hours spent with Kid Pix at our macintosh back in the days! Still remember all the sounds and effects, especially this weird magic gum thing.

Kid Pix 3 and Kid Pix 4 were foundational computing experiences for me.

I remember wasting way too much time with the rudimentary speech-to-text

We can bring Kid Pix with the bomb back. Someone Show HN tomorrow Kid Pix ported to wasm

Perfect reminder to play a little kid pix to get my mind right.

the picture galleries on that site are great, I wish I had chronicled things that way.

My dad's Mac had it - I remember some versions of Kid Pix had a sort of "I don't know what to draw" menu item, which would generate complete nonsense like "[An astronaut] [on the surface of the Moon] is [riding horseback] but he needs [someone to take a photo]. Try that". Makes me wonder if it inspired the AI image model prompting modality.

oh man I loved Kid Pix in like grade 1!

"Oh no!"

Yet another reminder to begin with the thing that sparks joy, and go from there. Thanks for posting. His photography in the deep archive section is great.

That's a link going unclicked.