New Windows users will soon find themselves without an iconic, free paint program that launched 32 years ago.

Microsoft Paint is being removed from Windows 10 as part of a looming update from Microsoft Corp. That update, called the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, will greatly expand how Windows users create things, by adding apps and features that use the cloud for storage and collaboration, add 3D creation tools and open up virtual reality to new audiences.

Microsoft’s update provides a lot of forward-looking new technologies, but at the same time, the company appears to be ejecting the old to make room for the new.

Microsoft Paint, also known as MS Paint and formerly known as Paintbrush, was initially introduced with Windows version 1.0 in 1985. The user interface and version best-known today found shape a few years later with a version of Paintbrush in Windows 3.0 that supported a bitmap format called BMP. As time went on, Paint’s capabilities evolved: the software added different brush widths, the ability to form complex polygons and draw lines, fill areas and began to support common image file formats such as PNG, GIF and JPEG.

Microsoft Paint was and is a simple program with a simple purpose: Provide a canvas, for free, that anyone could use to just “paint” pixels and save it in a format that can be read by virtually any graphics program and display on almost any screen.

The software has spawned entire communities of amateur artists who use MS Paint to produce crappy drawings for entertainment or to do quick illustrations for stories and commentary. The Reddit community /r/MsPaint contains an ongoing curated gallery of creations produced by the program by neophytes and aged experts alike. Many participants simply post their finished artwork, but some go so far as to record their process on video sites such as YouTube to show the elegance of simple software.

With MS Paint artists have used the software to make simple-quick doodles such as this creation by Reddit user Fredthespacecat of Widowmaker from Blizzard Entertainment’s game Overwatch to the extremely profound, such as recreating the Mona Lisa on video.

The Reddit community /r/LegalAdvice is particularly in love with bad MS Paint drawings of property lines when asking about legal disputes, including one post about a neighbor’s tractor and another involving a neighbor accidentally land-locking themselves by selling their only access to a nearby road. For more examples of what can be done with Paint, artwork curation website DeviantArt has a tremendous selection under the keyword “MS Paint.”

The sheer ubiquity of Paint — it has shipped with every version of Windows since the beginning — has led it to become one of the most useful illustrative tools placed in the hands of a giant audience. Its passing will leave a vacuum that may be difficult to fill for the generations that grew up on it.

With the removal of MS Paint, Microsoft will most likely replace it with recently previewed Paint 3D. This new software completely changes the interface and its purpose — it’s clear Microsoft wants to make 3D artwork as simple as terrible 2D doodles.

Those who want to keep using the original MS Paint after it has passed to the great app graveyard in the digital sky can look to numerous free alternatives. Notable apps include simple photo editor paint.net and open-source paint program Krita. Painting software that mimics MS Paint exists, such as open-source alternative OpenPaint. And Microsoft added Monday that it will offer Paint as a standalone app in the Windows Store.

But whether it will remain a mainstream product remains to be seen, and it may take some time for a clear leader to emerge that will elicit anywhere near the nostalgia of Paint.

Image: Kyt Dotson