Collection
PCPaintbrush Clip Art 1994
pcpaintbrush-1994 · 1994
3,010 objects held · 2,819 on display
Catalogued from a 1994 clip-art disc credited on the source item to SoftKey. The PC Paintbrush name reaches back further than that credit suggests: it originated with ZSoft Corporation, which — in the words of the trade record — was "bought by WordStar, which was later bought by SoftKey, which was later bought by The Learning Company." By 1994 the name had already passed up that chain into the SoftKey/WordStar estate, which is why the disc carries a SoftKey attribution rather than a ZSoft one. That lineage is not a footnote here. A substantial share of this collection reappears, image for image, in the SoftKey ClipArt Ultimate Collection issued two years later under the same corporate roof — the archive records both copies and marks one canonical. As held, the collection runs to roughly three thousand catalogued accessions, a meaningful fraction of them duplicates of one another or of siblings elsewhere in the estate. It is a working portrait of how a mid-1990s software house moved a clip-art library from one product to the next without redrawing a line.
- Disclosure
- Publisher: attributed on the source item to SoftKey; the "PC Paintbrush" name descends ZSoft → WordStar → SoftKey → The Learning Company. "SoftKey" as a brand has not existed since 1996; no single present-day rights-holder is confirmed. No rights are claimed by this archive.