There was a Photoshop 1.0 once upon a time, and while until now the code has remained under lock and key, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA has decided to release it for the first time for the world to see, CNET reports.
Grady Booch, Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM Research:
Opening the files that constituted the source code for Photoshop 1.0, I felt a bit like Howard Carter as he first breached the tomb of King Tutankhamen. What wonders awaited me?
I was not disappointed by what I found. Indeed, it was a marvelous journey to open up the cunning machinery of an application I’d first used over 20 years ago.
It took 128,000 lines of code to create, and was written in Pascal. From the moment Photoshop 1.0 started shipping, 10 million copies were sold over the next ten years. It was a total revolution in the way we viewed and edited images, so much so that ‘to photoshop’ is in the dictionary.
In order to download it, you need to agree to a lengthy license agreement, which you can find here. While the code may not be as useful to some as to others, it’s worth thinking just how far Photoshop has come in 23 years.
