paintbrush or mspaint executable file? [closed]

Question

When did pbrush.exe become mspaint.exe?

What was it in win98? win95? windows 3.1? (no doubt win 3.1 it was pbrush.exe.. )

I doubt i'm imagining things, it was pbrush.exe at one time. I'd like to know when the transition was.

Also, when did the whole application get renamed from paintbrush to mspaint? and did the executable change with it at the same time?

ADDED-

MaxMackie mentioned this which is an interesting page and answers it. http://blog.jonschneider.com/2007/06/mystery-of-phantom-pbrushexe-file.html
From some newsgroup posts that I came across while researching this issue, apparently on Windows 9x series machines (e.g. Windows 98), a pbrush.exe file actually was included in the system32 directory that was just a stub which executed mspaint.exe. (In even older Windows versions, pbrush.exe was the 16-bit version of the Paint program; the 32-bit version, mspaint.exe, was apparently introduced with Windows 95.)

For the 32-bit Windows NT series, an engineer at Microsoft must have decided to switch the pbrush command from working via the actual pbrush.exe stub file to taking advantage of the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths registry key.

Answer 1

The first version of Paint was introduced with the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0. It was a licensed version of ZSoft Corporation's PC Paintbrush. Paint was later renamed to Paintbrush in Windows 3.0, but the name was changed back to Paint in Windows 95 and later. This version only supported the MSP and BMP file formats. The former is no longer supported by newer versions of Paint, along with PCX and RLE. Older versions cannot open or edit PNG files, and can only open GIF, JPEG, and TIFF files with a graphics filter for the specific file type.