When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
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. To download the code you must agree to the terms of the license.
Adobe Photoshop 1 Source Code
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- Sabre
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Adobe Photoshop 1 Source Code
Computer history
Sabre (Julian)
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Good choice putting $4,000 rims on your 1990 Honda Civic. That's like Betty White going out and getting her tits done.
92.5% Stock 04 STI
Good choice putting $4,000 rims on your 1990 Honda Civic. That's like Betty White going out and getting her tits done.
- ElZorro
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Re: Adobe Photoshop 1 Source Code
Wow, Pascal.... that takes me back a minute.
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- zaxrex
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Re: Adobe Photoshop 1 Source Code
Darrin's fingerprints are on files bundled in V3 source IIRC.
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- Sabre
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Re: Adobe Photoshop 1 Source Code
That's right! I wonder if he gets royalties...
Sabre (Julian)
92.5% Stock 04 STI
Good choice putting $4,000 rims on your 1990 Honda Civic. That's like Betty White going out and getting her tits done.
92.5% Stock 04 STI
Good choice putting $4,000 rims on your 1990 Honda Civic. That's like Betty White going out and getting her tits done.
- zaxrex
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Re: Adobe Photoshop 1 Source Code
He is royalty!
Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears
- drwrx
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Re: Adobe Photoshop 1 Source Code
I get nothing. When "Big Electric Cat" came out (pre Photoshop 4.0 beta) there was a bit of my code and GUI for a color gamut adjustment tool.
Adobe DevLab was a short lived, but very cool, development period. This is where folks like Kai's Power Tools and Alien Skin came from. It helped Photoshop make a huge jump in version 4.0.
Somewhere in my basement should be a Photoshop 1.0 box with all the 3.5" floppy discs and manual.
Adobe DevLab was a short lived, but very cool, development period. This is where folks like Kai's Power Tools and Alien Skin came from. It helped Photoshop make a huge jump in version 4.0.
Somewhere in my basement should be a Photoshop 1.0 box with all the 3.5" floppy discs and manual.
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Re: Adobe Photoshop 1 Source Code
ha, i forgot all about kai's power tools. man, those were a fun few years.
that reminds me that i have some floppies i really need to copy off before i can't.
that reminds me that i have some floppies i really need to copy off before i can't.
2004 impreza outback
1964 beetle
1964 beetle