Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code (1990)

Quite the praise by Grady Booch:

"There are only a few comments in the version 1.0 source code, most of which are associated with assembly language snippets. That said, the lack of comments is simply not an issue. This code is so literate, so easy to read, that comments might even have gotten in the way."

"This is the kind of code I aspire to write.”

"His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic" is underselling John Knoll a bit - he became one of the more prominent figures there and won two Oscars for his work (and was nominated for more).

Taking his contribution for Photoshop into account, one could say that if you saw mainstream motion or still pictures in the Western world in the last three decades, you'll probably saw something influenced by him in one way or another.

When this got released I really expected someone in the opensource community to run with it, but as far as I know no one has. Back around 1990 a Graphic designer that had his office n the same building as my mom worked in let me copy his Photoshop 1.x disks and nothing has ever compared to it for me. When will we get the linux port of Photoshop 1.0? I would love to see how it develops.

That software box on the shelf at Babbage’s is a cherished memory—a tangible oddity of software distribution prior to broadband, now just a relic in memory. Most of us assumed it would last forever. We get our software at the click of a button now, but we traded something for that.

I used to demonstrate PS1 in my digital painting class. I would show that without a layer-based system it was still possible to create a composite using calculations feature. The process is incredibly simple… an alpha, a foreground and a background plus some addition and multiplication. Even art students understand it. I’m still blown away by how much functionality they managed to squeeze into an executable small encounter to email to someone.

FYI.., the version I used was registered to Apple. Apparently, the Knoll brothers demoed PS to apple and they promptly shared it amongst themselves and their buddies. Almost all illegitimate copies of it are derived from that pirated copy.

Fun fact… John knolls wife was the founding member of the Photoshop ‘Widows’ club… a home to people who have lost loved ones to software.

This code was likely written on a Macintosh Plus with a 9 in (23 cm) monochrome display that had a resolution of 512 × 342. Something to keep in mind. That's very little screen real estate (tiny!) and something that had to be respected. Writing long winded stuff had a cost in performance and maintainability. We sometimes wrote the documentation separately when needed. Sometimes that was printed out for ease of consumption. Then we have the issue that the Mac had only just been upgraded to 1MB of memory (4MB potentially) and only 800 KB floppy drive. And an 8 mhz processor.

I learned Photoshop while working with John at ILM in the 90's. Cool!

I ran an exhibit of eight machines from my retrocomputing collection last year, including a 1986 Mac Plus with 1MB RAM running Photoshop 1.0. People really enjoyed it! It’s kind of remarkable what you can still do with it and how freeing it is to have singular focus in an app.

There was something magical about white floppies, as shown in the screenshot.

Interesting little read. I always find it fascinating when old code holds up really well - especially structurally. Great trip down memory lane!

>To download the code you must agree to the terms of the license, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.

Note this is a toxic license. Accepting it and/or reading of the code has potential for legal liability.

Still, applaud releasing the source code, even if encumbered. Preservation is most important, and any legal teeth will eventually expire with the copyright.

Gimp source code: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp

> "Software architect Grady Booch is the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM Research Almaden and a trustee of the Computer History Museum. He offers the following observations about the Photoshop source code."

OMG. Booch?? The father of UML is still around? Given that UML is a true crime against humanity, it just goes to show there is no justice in the world. (I want a lifespan refund for the amount of time I spent learning UML and Design Patterns back in the bad old Enterprise Java days. Oof)

Wow! Writing photoshop while a phd student at Michigan! Wish current students would do some code

Still better than GIMP... /s (maybe)