After three decades, Microsoft to phase out Paint

NEW YORK (FOX 5 NEWS) - Microsoft Paint has been standard on every version of Windows for the last 32 years.

"Nobody is using Microsoft Paint still except people who are maybe having fun fooling around on the Internet," tech journalist Seth Porges said. "Microsoft Paint is this relic of a bygone era."

And for that reason, Microsoft announced Monday that it planned to stop updating MS Paint, thereby casting it aside and beginning the process of phasing it out completely.

"From a professional perspective, there's a reason Microsoft is no longer going to be updating this software: nobody really uses it," Porges said.

But for many of us, Paint represented our first introduction to manipulating images on a computer. It was one of the few pre-internet programs not blocked or deleted from machines in libraries, classrooms, and workplaces that allowed us to waste time in favor of completing some other assigned task.

Those millions -- if not tens or hundreds of millions or more -- of crude images not saved (why would they be?) Now fade into our memories, growing ever hazier as this program for doodlers, amateur artists, and early meme makers gradually vanishes from our computing lives altogether.