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Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan, had written a program in 1987 to display and modify digital images. His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, found it useful for editing photos, but it wasn’t intended to be a product. Thomas said, “We developed it originally for our own personal use…it was a lot a fun to do.”
Gradually the program, called “Display”, became more sophisticated. In the summer of 1988 they realized that it indeed could be a credible commercial product. They renamed it “Photoshop” and began to search for a company to distribute it. About 200 copies of version 0.87 were bundled by slide scanner manufacturer Barneyscan as “Barneyscan XP”.
The fate of Photoshop was sealed when Adobe, encouraged by its art director Russell Brown, decided to buy a license to distribute an enhanced version of Photoshop. The deal was finalized in April 1989, and version 1.0 started shipping early in 1990.
Over the next ten years, more than 3 million copies of Photoshop were sold.
That first version of Photoshop was written primarily in Pascal for the Apple Macintosh, with some machine language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor where execution efficiency was important. It wasn’t the effort of a huge team. Thomas said, “For version 1, I was the only engineer, and for version 2, we had two engineers.” While Thomas worked on the base application program, John wrote many of the image-processing plug-ins.
With the permission of Adobe Systems Inc., the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop. All the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple. There are 179 files in the zipped folder, comprising about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented but well-structured code. By line count, about 75% of the code is in Pascal, about 15% is in 68000 assembler language, and the rest is data of various sorts.
Download Photoshop version 1.0.1 Source Code
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:48PM (1 child)
Everything was more intuitive before the Year 2000. Whenever I need to test something quickly I still have number of old tools handy such as QBasic when I don't want to write 1000 lines of code and add 3 libraries just to draw a line to the screen to visualize something. Got a copy of Open Watcom for that too when QBasic is too slow, and Visual Basic 6 when I need something on windows quick and easy (And not slow/bloated like .NET). Works good enough in Wine too if I'm in pinch.
It's always nice to see how things back then didn't need a whole bunch of hand holding like we have today to get tasks done. They also didn't need these "Beautiful" UX designs from a bunch of losers in California who drink too much coffee and wear plaid clothing 24/7. It's times like this that make realize how much the "Modern" web was a mistake. Screw it, let's all go back to the way it was back when we had BBSes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by goodie on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:54PM
The worst thing for me is that the premise of all that web crap "multiplatform" or "WORE" is a fallacy. At the end of the day, you have to customize. Might not be for the OS, but it may be for the browser/device. It's kinda sad that a lot of the time spent in dev is spent re-writing stuff to work with the latest trendy framework that adds 0.2% benefits for 25% extra crap/bloat/maintenance headaches...