The first version of Paint was programmed by Dan McCabe and introduced with the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0, in November 1985 as a competitor to Macintosh's MacPaint.

Microsoft eventually reversed course and announced an updated version of Paint in Windows 11, with Paint 3D being deprecated. However, Paint continued to be included with Windows 10. Microsoft had envisioned Paint 3D as a replacement. In July 2017, Microsoft added Paint to the list of deprecated features of Windows 10 and announced that it would become a free standalone application in Microsoft Store. For its simplicity and wide availability, it rapidly became one of the most used Windows applications, introducing many to painting on a computer for the first time.

The program can be in color mode or two-color black-and-white, but there is no grayscale mode. The program opens, modifies and saves image files in Windows bitmap (BMP), JPEG, GIF, PNG, and single-page TIFF formats. Microsoft Paint is a simple raster graphics editor that has been included with all versions of Microsoft Windows. IA-32, x86-64, and ARM (historically Itanium, DEC Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC)

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