Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @12:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the classical-sauce dept.

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:35PM

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:35PM (#683807)

    I became a Photoshop user in about 1992 on (I think) an Apple IIc.

    It was bloody awful. I was a Photolithographer, and the idea was that we could retouch pics and do colour correction quicker and easier than using film separations, but we couldn't and it wasn't.

    Frankly, if I wasn't restarting the Mac due it locking completely I was restarting Photoshop after it crashed.

    It was not really until about 1994 (or so, memory is a bit vague to be honest) that digital systems could really compete with manually editing film.

    Of course in no time at all every kid leaving high school wanted to be a "graphic designer" and the wages slumped to almost nothing, so I got the hell out altogether.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3