[HN Gopher] Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)
___________________________________________________________________
Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 379 points
Date : 2024-05-15 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (computerhistory.org)
| stockhorn wrote:
| An article from 2013 with an adobe photoshop version 1.x from
| 1990....
| boomskats wrote:
| I'm pretty sure half of that code is still running in WASM on
| photoshop.adobe.com
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| You mean current photoshop includes pascal code?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I would not be surprised if it does. Photoshop is big and
| has a lot of legacy.
| dlachausse wrote:
| I have a feeling that much of it was translated to C or
| C++ at some point for portability and maintainability
| reasons. There are several automated Pascal to C
| translators out there, such as the following...
|
| http://users.fred.net/tds/lab/p2c/
|
| Also the languages are similar enough that a programmer
| with knowledge of both could translate it manually
| without too much difficulty.
| dunham wrote:
| Typically TeX is translated from Pascal to C too, via
| web2c.
|
| But there also is a Pascal to WASM compiler out there,
| which was written specifically for TeX:
|
| https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js
|
| TeX itself is only about 500kb of wasm, uncompressed, but
| the memory images with LaTeX loaded are quite a bit
| larger.
| wongarsu wrote:
| What's wrong with Pascal, apart from the ability to hire
| developers for it?
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Writing in Pascal itself is a Job Preservation Pattern
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I hated the dialects of Pascal we were using at school in
| the early 1980s because they didn't really support
| systems programming but after I got a 286 machine I got
| into Turbo Pascal which did have the extensions I need
| and that I preferred greatly to C but I switched to C in
| college because I could write C programs and run them on
| my PC or on Sun workstations with a 32 bit address space.
| miohtama wrote:
| Turbo Pascal and later Delphi were really nice, but I
| guess in the same vertical C won due to its UNIX legacy.
|
| You can pretty much transform 1:1 between C and Pascal
| code.
| callalex wrote:
| Tools used for art often get irrationally preserved for the
| sake of it. For example I have had a conversation with more
| than one person (well 2 but still) who believed
| unironically that the wiring inside vintage guitars and
| amps must be coated with asbestos insulation or it would
| change the tone/texture of the sound.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Don't crush that in a hydraulic press.
| mdaniel wrote:
| (2013)
| Eduard wrote:
| I find the addition of "(2013)" to the title misleading.
|
| "Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)"
|
| I thought it is about Photoshop source code from around 2013.
| thih9 wrote:
| > they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word
| to the dictionary.
|
| Adobe tries to fight that, as this leads to genericization[1].
| Their trademark guidelines[2] state a number of examples, like:
|
| "Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form.
| Correct: The image was enhanced with Adobe(r) Photoshop(r)
| Elements software. Incorrect: The image was photoshopped."
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
|
| [2]: https://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html
| andai wrote:
| I understand the pressure they're under, but nobody's going to
| say that...
| chias wrote:
| "Oh you're not actually using Linux, that's GNU/Linux"
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| TIL, "Linux", without the "GNU/" prefix is a registered
| trademark of Linus Torvalds.
|
| https://ubuntu.com/legal/trademarks#:~:text=Linux%C2%AE%20i
| s....
|
| So (in the US, at least), it's "Linux(TM)" and not
| "GNU/Linux" - I'm going to love using this the next time
| anyone goes uhmackshully to me.
| medmunds wrote:
| Uhmackshully, since it's _registered_ , it's "Linux(r)".
| The (tm) is for _unregistered_ trademarks.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Hoisted by my own petard!
| afavour wrote:
| I'm sure they know that. The text is there so that they can
| stand up in court and point to it, not because they think
| people will actually follow the instructions.
| electroly wrote:
| It's just like "LEGO(r) bricks." They're desperately trying
| to avoid genericization but it's way too late and nobody is
| going to say that informally. All companies want you to use
| their trademarks as capitalized adjectives but nobody can
| make you, personally, do that. But it does help with their
| official corporate partners who will follow the guidance if
| they want to stay in Adobe/LEGO's good graces.
| deusum wrote:
| I believe it's now well into the realm of genericization.[1]
| Xerox lost a major lawsuit relatedly, iirc.
|
| [1] e.g,
| https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/15-product-trade...
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| I photoshopped an image with Gimp.
| Zambyte wrote:
| While using GIMP
| resource_waste wrote:
| No you didn't. No one actually uses Gimp. We just say 'Gimp
| is a replacement for photoshop' and pretend that is actually
| an acceptable solution for people using Linux.
|
| (Btw I switched to Krita and I'm never going back to Gimp.
| Even the things Gimp should be good at, Krita is better.)
| rvense wrote:
| Personally I crop screenshots with GIMP twice a year and
| it's absolutely fine for that. Not sure what your problem
| is.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| If your use-case is "crop screenshots", your competition
| isn't Photoshop, it's MS Paint.
| bmacho wrote:
| There aren't many image editors that are able to crop
| pictures in a usable way. MS Paint for example can't do
| that. I wonder if the "move this rectangle" method is
| under patents.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If there was a linux port of paint, I'd consider it.
| Until then, GIMP is fine.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Check out Pinta. It does basic image editing pretty well,
| imo.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| GIMP is the screenshot cropping tool, or for when you want
| to write a Lisp program to do a single, technically-precise
| thing to an image. Krita for everything else!
|
| I'm still waiting for the Krita equivalent of Inkscape.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I use Lisp extensions all the time for things people
| claim GIMP can't do, like draw certain shapes.
|
| GIMP is to Emacs as Photoshop is to Intellij. Both GIMP
| and Emacs are fairly lean out of the box; it is meant to
| be molded into what the user wants. The problem is the
| target audience of Emacs is much more keen on
| programmatically modifying their systems than the target
| audience of GIMP.
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| sounds like exactly what ronin is for
|
| tutorial/example video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgAWGh1s9zg
| ltlnx wrote:
| What issues do you have with Inkscape? I've used it for
| both (semi-)professional and personal work, and the UX is
| quite pleasant.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I gimped an image with Adobe Photoshop(r)
| downrightmike wrote:
| such a terrible name
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Nobody's ever accused open source of being good at naming
| stuff
| aragonite wrote:
| Do the users find the name terrible though? I'm pretty sure
| on at least 3 different occasions I heard someone excitely
| yelling "time to bring out the GIMP!" or some such when
| they needed to do some quick photo editing.
|
| Case in point:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4CjOB0y9nI&t=2518s
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah, GIMP is an awesome name. It's fun and playful, one
| of the better named programs out there imo.
| hallarempt wrote:
| I, as the Krita maintainer, hereby give everyone the right to
| verb the trademarked name "krita". Whether it's I "krittered
| that concept" or "I kritaed that sketch" -- it's fine!
|
| The only thing you cannot do with the trademarked name krita
| is publish rip-off, spyware-laden versions in places like
| eBay.
| tjoff wrote:
| Is genericization _really_ a problem though?
| caseyohara wrote:
| Yes, companies can lose the exclusive right to their mark if
| the brand is sufficiently genericized. Just ask Frisbee,
| (Kawasaki) Jet Ski, ChapStick, Velcro, Lego, Band-Aid,
| Jacuzzi, the list goes on.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
| quesera wrote:
| Most annoyingly, IMO: _Sriracha_.
|
| The Huy Fong guy decided not to trademark the term, and
| consequently in the last few years, _everyone_ is selling a
| Sriracha sauce, all of which are grossly inferior to the
| original.
|
| I've tried many of them, being lately in a Huy Fong desert,
| and esp during their period of production issues.
|
| There are a couple of also-rans, rating maybe 7 stars out
| of 10. They do not taste like real Sriracha, but they're
| OK. If they didn't call themselves _Sriracha_ , I might
| appreciate them more.
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| I don't think that's any more annoying than "ketchup" or
| "barbecue" sauce not being trademarked. I hear the sauce
| made by their original pepper suppliers is pretty good
| though.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Yes, just ask Velcro(tm):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY
| edmara wrote:
| Of course. A trademark exists to mutually protect consumers
| and businesses from deceptive advertising. When a term
| referring to a specific product becomes a term for a product
| category etc, trademark protections then becomes harmful to
| consumers, but they still benefit the business. If you're
| building a brand generally you want to be as close to the
| legal limit as possible without exceeding it
| somat wrote:
| ehh... I am not sure,
|
| A photo shop was a thing long before adobe made some software
| that could replace an entire photo shop and called it...
| Photoshop. Verb your nouns and that thing you do in a photo
| shop becomes "to photoshop"
|
| I think the insistence on using the "Adobe(r) Photoshop(r)" is
| more that the term is already sort of generic and they are on
| shaky ground from the start. Sort of like windows, or dos,
| Microsoft goes hard always calling it "Microsoft Windows(r)" or
| "MS DOS(r)" because just windows, or disk operating system are
| already very generic terms.
|
| https://youtube.com/v/BR6F0EdyulA?t=404 (dave plummer)
|
| Not that this will stop them from trying to sue you if you
| release products using those terms, Gotta give the lawyers
| something to do after all. Otherwise they would just be sitting
| around wasting money.
|
| This is in contrast to Xerox a term invented specifically for a
| new invention and the company that invented it.
| deaddodo wrote:
| It doesn't necessarily matter if you follow their guidelines
| or not, this is all legal facade so that they can retain
| their trademark. In the majority of instances, they simply
| have to show they made efforts to retain their unique
| trademark. They don't care that you say "I photoshopped X"
| they just care that GIMP isn't marketed as "GIMP: Open Source
| Photoshop" (or similar instances).
| maurosilber wrote:
| "Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form.
|
| Incorrect: The image was photoshopped.
|
| Correct: The image was enhanced with GIMP software."
| ian-g wrote:
| Much more effectively, Velcro's been trying the same thing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY
|
| It still won't work in the long run, but I'm very aware now
| that Velcro is a trademarked name.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Which do you think has more features, this or current GIMP?
| Zambyte wrote:
| GIMP has a plugin system and this does not AFAIK, so you're
| comparing unbounded features vs bounded features.
| resource_waste wrote:
| What has accomplished more work? Photoshop prior to 2013, or
| Gimp all time?
|
| Lol we all know.
|
| Why is Gimp the knee jerk reaction when its rarely used in the
| real world? Did we learn it in the 2000s and just keep
| repeating it? (I say this as a Krita fan)
| MayeulC wrote:
| The source code in the linked article is for Photoshop
| v1.0.1, published in 1990.
|
| Though I don't think Gimp is as rarely used in the real world
| as you seem to think. We all live in different bubbles, but I
| know more people that use GIMP than Photoshop.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Why are you comparing it to Photoshop in 2013? The article is
| about Photoshop in 1990.
| TIPSIO wrote:
| Incredible that the UX is still generally the same. What a vision
| the original engineers had.
|
| I am annoyed today though every time I open the app. The only
| time it has ever felt snappy on desktop was a sweet period when
| the MacBook Pro M1 first came out and Adobe Photoshop had a
| Silicon beta out.
|
| Those days are long gone and we are slow again.
| darknavi wrote:
| I still use an old CS6 license and while it's snappy in the
| app, it still takes its time to boot.
| aredox wrote:
| Is it because the UX is good or because changing it is
| impossible without the users rebelling en masse?
| biofox wrote:
| No point fixing something that isn't broken (someone please
| tell Microsoft)
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> No point fixing something that isn't broken_
|
| But how do you know a UX isn't broken, when you've only
| seen one iteration of it you're whole life and have nothing
| else to compare it to? Kind of like Plato's Cave Allegory.
|
| You have to try new things, and if you see them fail, then
| you know which one was the best.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "try" doesn't imply "ship to millions of customers"
|
| And sometimes there's good enough and you should leave it
| alone. QWERTY isn't optimal but it's not very far from
| it.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| But if you're not gonna ship it to all your millions of
| users and receive the outrage as feedback, how will you
| ever know if it works or not?
|
| A/B testing to a few users only works in web-app front-
| ends, not in professional tools where all single end-user
| releases need to look and act exactly the same.
|
| Shipping to only a handful of users wasn't a thing in the
| era of "Gold CD" releases, and even in the era of the
| internet updates, nobody will want to take part in A/B
| testing and end up with a different Photoshop UX than
| what his colleague is using, so you either ship to all or
| none.
|
| So it seems Photoshop's UI is more of a cause of inertia
| and resistance to change, rather than nailing right the
| first time.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A/B testing does very little to improve any UX. It's got
| merits in performance optimization, where the
| implementation differs but the contract is static between
| A and B, but with user interfaces, it generally leads to
| pessimizations as usage is not proportional to
| usefulness.
|
| The rare exception is single-purpose interfaces where
| increasing one singular interaction is an end in itself,
| e.g. a marketing page, but that's a pretty unique case
| that is very far removed from a productivity tool.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You bring in testers and UI experts, and you have the
| experts watch the testers.
|
| Shipping to mass market is a bad way to get feedback.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Are there such a thing as UI experts anymore? It seems
| like we only have designers left, and I am none too
| thrilled about their influence.
| eimrine wrote:
| Qwerty is a significant brake in learning English from
| scratch.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| How so?
|
| And I'm pretty sure an alphabetical keyboard would do
| much more harm than good, if that's the implied
| alternative.
| aredox wrote:
| AZERTY is very bad and France is still stuck with it,
| despite Quebec having a variant of QWERTY for decades,
| ditto for Switzerland having a custom QWERTZ, and BEPO
| being heads above.
| beau_g wrote:
| Use gimp, add a new layer, paste something into it, and
| resize it, then you will know
| frankharv wrote:
| How about PhotoShop's Magic Lasso?
|
| I have not found many tools that work as well and make
| productivity great.
| navjack27 wrote:
| Hard to do when the power users for the most part try to
| block analytics and the insider testers have very fluid
| workflows and there is no such thing as death by a thousand
| papercuts to them. They aren't getting the signal because
| the people that should be telling them the signal are
| actively denying sending the signal.
| eimrine wrote:
| Are you saying this about OS which shows ads in Start
| menu?
| turnsout wrote:
| In Photoshop there are at least three completely different
| dialog boxes [0] for saving an image as a JPEG, each with
| totally different UI widgets and functionality.
|
| They simply refuse to revise anything in the interface--
| they just keep adding. It's the software equivalent of
| hoarding.
|
| [0] Save/Save as, Export As, Save for Web (Legacy)
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm ride-or-die on Save for Web (Legacy), it's the way to
| go by far.
|
| Now if they'd just integrate the tinypng plugin that was
| deprecated in 2023 -
| https://help.tinify.com/help/deprecation-of-the-
| photoshop-pl...
| turnsout wrote:
| Same--I just wish they'd either drop the "(Legacy)" and
| admit that they can never remove it, or add those same
| features to the Export dialog!
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I cant speak for all PS users, but it's not that it is a
| special UX so much that it is embedded in the muscle memory
| of the user community, and that degree of familiarity
| contributes mightily to people being able to get work done
| quickly.
|
| The closest example I cam think of, which people inside Adobe
| most certainly know about, is the failed attempts by Quark
| Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s,
| which led to them losing a 95% market share position to Adobe
| InDesign. You do not mess with the tools that a loud and
| creative community rely upon to get their jobs done.
| philistine wrote:
| The only way Adobe can get out of this conundrum is by
| announcing a transition to a new interface, finding ways to
| incentivize schools to teach the new interface, while
| keeping the old one around for as long as possible to give
| time for the oldies to slowly retire. We're talking
| decades.
| basch wrote:
| The user interface is extremely customizable. You can
| have a default layout and still keep legacy ones around.
| You wouldn't need to kill the legacy layout unless you
| are removing the cuetomizability.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| Adobe actually changed a bunch of shortcuts at least a
| couple of points between photoshop 7 and creative cloud. I
| remember how I'd developed muscle memory that took a bit to
| fully overwrite.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| There are settings to revert them all
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| Yeah but I wanted to maintain "compatibility" with others
| using the software whether for discussion's sake or so I
| can hop on their workstation and not have to think about
| changing anything. Turning those legacy settings on and
| having that survive restarts could be flaky/buggy. I got
| the impression keeping that functionality well tested
| wasn't the highest thing on their development priorities.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Adobe needs an easier and broader "settings" in the
| cloud. It should be as easy as login in to have your
| completely bespoke Photoshop greeting you.
| bonaldi wrote:
| _is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their
| product in the late 90s /early 00s_
|
| There were a number of factors here - outsourcing
| engineering leading to a disastrously buggy 4.0, then
| failing to move to OS X for years after the market was
| ready to, hostile and arrogant approach to customers
| ("where else will they go?") and finally the misbegotten
| attempt to turn a DTP app into a web design tool. InDesign
| 1 was fairly clunky, but everyone was desperate to escape.
|
| It's an Amiga-like shambles of mismanagement that wasted an
| early lead; I am still nostalgic for both tbh.
| frankharv wrote:
| I don't know if I agree about InDesign being clunky.
|
| The problem was everybody liked PageMaker7 and nobody
| wanted something new.
|
| How about Audacity? The clowns simply bought CoolEdit and
| renamed it. Very innovative.
| invalidlogin wrote:
| Audacious.
| frankharv wrote:
| Whoops I meant Adobe Audition=CoolEditPro
| nprateem wrote:
| Intellij are about to learn this lesson unfortunately.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Considering how many complaints about GIMP UI being bad with
| no more substance than "Just compare it to Photoshop!", I'd
| bet 65% on option B.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| As someone, who used Photoshop a lot, the UI/UX is good. It
| would be pretty hard to make it significantly better. And
| yes, even if you somehow made it better, many users would
| complain, because they have muscle memory of the UX, and are
| extremely efficient with it.
| maxglute wrote:
| It would be curious to see UX timeline of what PS influenced,
| and what influenced it, in mouse age. A lot of desktop
| derivative products seem to hold on PS-like UI, it's all very
| mutually reinforcing. I'm not sure what iPad UX is like. I
| remember autocad products also adding ribbon system and it
| wasn't end of the world, but also very few ppl that I know
| end up migrating.
|
| Part of me feels like it's... either very optimal for masses
| to learn because very few PSers (outside of photography) I
| know have professional peripherals (some have hotkey stickers
| on keycaps), vs lots of other creative fields have
| specialized decks/hardware to make streamline workflow.
|
| Like part of me feels like there is a better physical
| hardware implmentation to manipulate all the
| curves/histograms other than moving around with mouse, but
| mouse+keyboard is... good enough.
| bonaldi wrote:
| A lot of PS 1.0's UI (2-col toolbox on the left etc) owes
| its heritage to MacPaint, which was a launch app for the
| Mac. Even the iPad shares keyboard shortcuts set by the
| original Mac, though has considerably broken away in other
| aspects.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| When Photoshop went subscription I bought the full version of
| CS6 (or whatever the last non-subscription version was). It
| was very expensive. Then when that stopped working on Mac, I
| tried using every reasonable competitor, paid for several.
| I'm sure some of them are very competent tools, but it was a
| nightmare trying to learn a new UI. I bit the bullet and
| started paying the subscription.
| grishka wrote:
| Just downgrade? I still use some version from 2022, the first
| M1-compatible one that was cracked. Still as snappy as it was 2
| years ago.
| ompogUe wrote:
| Not sure if you worked with it in the early '90's, but on a Mac
| w/4MB of RAM, it took ~5-10 minutes to undo a Guassian Blur.
| The pain was real.
|
| The way to go back then was the SGI Indigo w/96MB.
|
| It worked best for me in the late '90's on a 9500, and even
| then needed an entire GB of RAM.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Ha! In the early '90's the way to go was Live Picture [1]!
| Your undo would have been instantaneous!
|
| Unfortunately, Live Picture only ran on Mac. Photoshop was a
| bit janky on SGI back then, IIRC, but still the better of the
| two platforms overall.
|
| [1] http://lensgarden.com/uncategorized/live-picture-
| software-th...
| ompogUe wrote:
| Yes, I remember Live Picture! It was slick. I actually
| spent more time in that and Fractal Design Painter, than
| Photoshop back then.
| huxley wrote:
| Hahaha that's Old School.
|
| Live Picture was one of several photo compositor tools that
| focused on Photoshop's pain points. Fauve Matisse was a
| little earlier than Live Picture and I believe it
| introduced layers to Mac photo editing. They ended up
| getting acquired by Macromedia (or perhaps even Macromind)
| after a rewrite to compete with Live Picture it was renamed
| Xres and then abandoned.
| apercu wrote:
| "SGI Indigo". I had one of these. Not for Photoshop but
| still...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "Indy: an Indigo without the 'go'". -- Mark Hughes (?)
|
| http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-
| haters/tirix/embarrassi...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > There are too many daemons. In a vanilla 5.1
| installation with Toto, there are 37 background
| processes.
|
| Comparing the output of `ps aux` on a default install of
| Debian and OpenBSD still gives me this feeling:)
| nullhole wrote:
| Excellent joke.
|
| Indy still had the best looking case, though, I think.
| There's something about that sliced-box appearance that's
| so unexpected and interesting.
| ljm wrote:
| The Messy Middle is an incredible book that essentially details
| how the CEO of BeHance, back in the day, rewrote Adobe's
| offering for the cloud, and detailed how he'd do it.
|
| Scott Belsky - now investor himself - writing how he sold both
| BeHance and Adobe down the road for the rent economy.
|
| I say The Messy Middle is an incredible book, but it is shelf
| help for dwindling execs.
|
| To their generic credit, the open source scene for artistry and
| imagery is better than it ever was, because everybody has been
| priced out of the pro tools that actually can't keep up without
| community support.
| vondur wrote:
| Back in 1997-98 we had Pentium II machines (450mhz) with fast
| SCSI drives and 128 MB of ram that were fast Photoshop
| machines. I also remember it being pretty fast on the G3 Mac's
| when they first came out.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| > I also remember it being pretty fast on the G3 Mac's when
| they first came out.
|
| One of the comments that Steve Jobs made in the Boston 1997
| speech was "No one at Apple has reached out to Adobe to ask
| how to build the ultimate Photoshop machine" - and in the
| next few years, Photoshop benchmarks were a key Mac vs Intel
| comparison during his keynotes.
|
| I don't know if Jobs already had influence on the original
| beige Power Macintosh G3, but he really seemed to care about
| Photoshop performance when he arrived.
| Rufus_Tuesday wrote:
| Anybody remember BarneyScan XP?
| dlachausse wrote:
| Kudos to companies that are releasing the source code to antique
| versions of their software. I hope more companies do so in the
| future.
|
| Unfortunately I fear that much of this source code has been lost
| to time and multiple serial acquisitions over the years. Also,
| wide spread use of version control is a fairly recent phenomenon,
| so much of this source code if it still exists at all is on
| random tape backups and floppy disks or printouts in binders.
| fermigier wrote:
| https://www.softwareheritage.org/
|
| "We collect and preserve software in source code form, because
| software embodies our technical and scientific knowledge and
| humanity cannot afford the risk of losing it.
|
| Software is a precious part of our cultural heritage. We curate
| and make accessible all the software we collect, because only
| by sharing it we can guarantee its preservation in the very
| long term."
|
| (Founded by a friend, Roberto Di Cosmo).
| derefr wrote:
| I feel like, if some organization like the Internet Archive
| were to offer a "software source-code time-delayed-publication
| escrow service" (with real boilerplate legal contracts
| punishing early leaks), a lot of companies would take them up
| on it.
|
| I imagine such a service could be pretty automated/low-touch.
| One way it could work:
|
| 1. you mirror your git repos to a private server the software-
| conservation org controls.
|
| 2. The software-conservation org then sets up matching public
| repos, initially empty.
|
| 3. Every hour, an agent runs, that scans all the private repos
| for commits _with commit timestamps older than ten years_ (or
| whatever each company has signed on for as a release period);
| and syncs just those commits, into that repo 's matching public
| repo.
|
| 4. Refs are then also synced, but rewritten, as if `git filter-
| branch` had been run to remove all commits less than ten years
| old. Any refs that are empty after filtering are dropped.
| ge96 wrote:
| wonder if anybody has it up on github
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Does the zip file not work?
| peterjmag wrote:
| Somebody pushed it up here: https://github.com/amix/photoshop
|
| But that might be violating the Computer History Museum's
| license:
| https://github.com/amix/photoshop/blob/2baca147594d01cf9d17d...
| SushiHippie wrote:
| > But that might be violating the Computer History Museum's
| license:
|
| Yep, TFA includes this sentence:
|
| > 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember seeing Photoshop, when it was pre-Adobe, in a
| hospital, in Ann Arbor.
|
| I thought it was amazing.
|
| One note: I'm almost certain that the version of MacApp (the
| Apple Pascal app framework) was still in beta, at the time.
|
| I used some of Tom Knoll's code (a B-spline algorithm), as a base
| for a curve editor. He had done some work as a contractor for the
| company I worked at.
| butchlugrod wrote:
| Great write-up here about what it takes to build the app from
| this source code:
| http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
| lelandfe wrote:
| Blown away as I read more posts on this site. Not many people
| out there with this sort of knowledge. Thanks for the link.
| butchlugrod wrote:
| I know! I have read every piece on the site, and they really
| go into some fantastic detail about old Apple stuff. No idea
| who this person it, and they have not posted in a few years,
| but would love to know more about their background. Almost
| certainly a developer inside Apple in the 80s and 90s.
| internetter wrote:
| Anyone having trouble adding this to their feed reader? The RSS
| works fine on my end, but Miniflux says This
| website is too slow and the request timed out: Get "http://basa
| lgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/rss.xml":
| dial tcp 209.182.219.107:80: i/o timeout
| hexagonwin wrote:
| seems to work just fine for me. maybe it was a temporary
| issue?
| divyenduz wrote:
| Is there a youtube channel or something that does deep dives into
| antique source code like this or windows XP?
| kasajian wrote:
| I remember traveling to Adobe in the mid-90s to exchange source-
| code with them, 'cause PhotoShop was MacApp based, and they had a
| layer working on Windows. And we traded an in-process SQL engine.
|
| I recall brining home some of the code, there were definitely
| parts of PhotoShop that were included, but not a lot. Just some
| funky color-space calculations that we ignored.
|
| I'm looking forward to looking at the source to see if there's
| any remnants of MacApp in the mix. They may have changed
| everything since the mid 90s. Who knows.
| irq wrote:
| I love this story - code trading is such a cool idea, and one I
| haven't heard of much before. Anyone else have any code trading
| stories?
| exe34 wrote:
| in academia/research, it's quite normal. often you wish they
| hadn't given you the code and provided an equation instead.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| They call that out as an exception specifically actually: "All
| the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications
| library that was licensed from Apple"
| mistrial9 wrote:
| MacApp on Windows ?!! of course.. what a bloatware.. Think
| Class Library saved the life of lots of devs. Greg Dow might
| still work for Adobe today. ps- PowerPlant was even better than
| TCL now thinking on it..
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPlant
| smburdick wrote:
| John Knoll was the FX lead for the Star Wars prequels, and went
| on to direct Rogue One.
|
| The behind the scenes documentaries for the prequels have aged
| well: https://youtu.be/da8s9m4zEpo?si=5y5gHUMxztwVzMny
| hondo77 wrote:
| VFX supervisor, exec producer, and story by, but not director
| of Rogue One: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3748528/reference/
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's a multi-part series "Light & Magic" on ILM available on
| Disney+ that I really enjoyed.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19896784/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_...
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17132058 - May 2018 (200
| comments)
|
| _Photoshop 1.0 Source Code_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215737 - Feb 2013 (78
| comments)
| Exuma wrote:
| I looked at the source code but I wish I could understand what
| makes it beautifully elegant. I was pondering this question
| before as I was learning rust, and how tricky it was (decision
| overload) to make just a snake game (regarding code structure). I
| then was thinking how one would build a UI, functions which
| operate on a "space", and I thought of photoshop specifically, or
| 3d studio max. So finding this repo was really cool, except I
| simply just don't understand it.
|
| If anyone knows of good resource I could learn code structure
| LMK! I find it interesting just from a learning perspective, as I
| always try to increase my design pattern chops
| logdahl wrote:
| I can't say much about this code or your personal background,
| but my honest opinion is to take a step back and examine the
| principles.
|
| I used to be very bothered by abstractions, design patterns and
| structure. But I realized that when I worked with 'true'
| imperative code (forget classes for a while), keeping all code
| in the same file, the code started to structure itself. I am
| not saying this is the only way, but I feel like OOP can be a
| hinderance, as you get bogged down by alternatives.
| mentos wrote:
| I wonder what the biggest semantic similarities are between the
| source code of the first 1990s Photoshop and today's.
| shivanshu120 wrote:
| Great article written on some of the best code out there in the
| market.
| dylan604 wrote:
| best code? Have you ever read people's thoughts on the PSD
| format? I know the two are not the same, but it does make you
| wonder how the PSD issues do not present in the app's code as
| well.
| anemoknee wrote:
| I haven't myself, but I'm interested to see what folks are
| thinking. Any resources you can share?
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'll just leave these here:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/n7auu6/psd_is_n
| o...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575122
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If I was going to complain about Photoshop it is that it does
| most operations in the chosen color space (say sRGB) instead
| of linear light. This is certainly wrong for operations that
| are physically motivated like blurs even if people sometimes
| like the result.
| supportengineer wrote:
| I prefer Photon Paint or DeluxePaint
| pmcjones wrote:
| In the aughts I worked at Adobe and spent time trying to archive
| the source code for Photoshop, Illustrator, PostScript, and other
| apps. Thomas Knoll's original Mac floppy disk backups were
| available, so I brought in my Mac Plus, with a serial cable to
| transfer the files to a laptop via Kermit. The first version was
| 0.54, dated 6 July 1988. The files on the floppies were in
| various ancient compressed archive formats, but most were
| readable. I created an archive on a special Perforce server of
| all the code that I found. Sadly, the earliest Illustrator
| backups were on a single external disk drive that had gone bad.
| xd1936 wrote:
| Thank you for your service. Super cool project. Hopefully they
| make their way to archive.org or Github someday.
| pmcjones wrote:
| Adobe has the only copy, and they have donated early versions
| of PostScript (https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-
| digital-printi...) and Photoshop; people should ask Adobe to
| release more. Everything I find in the public domain I post
| at https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects .
| mistrial9 wrote:
| isn't the topic the Patents, not the code? The code is
| mired in Mac toolbox details, no?
| reaperman wrote:
| Even the parents from 1988-2000 would be well expired now
| irrational wrote:
| Poor moms and dads.
| jart wrote:
| Wow are you the one that posted the original LISP 1.5
| source code? I colorized that and used it to good effect in
| my blog posts. https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/#listing
| pmcjones wrote:
| I beat the bushes for the source code, documenting my
| finds
| (https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/category/lisp/)
| and posting them (https://www.softwarepreservation.org/pr
| ojects/LISP/lisp15_fa...), but the early work was done by
| Jack Harper, Pascal Bourguignon, Rich Cornwell and Bob
| Abeles, Andru Luvisi, Angelo Papenhoff, Al Kossow, and
| others.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the Illustrator guy was in Palo Alto and approachable .. at the
| time the feedback was that the interface interactions were not
| great .. hard to say now, but Freehand became popular quickly,
| then folded.
| pmcjones wrote:
| Mike Schuster, who by the way is a superb programmer.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| "We developed it originally for our own personal use...it was a
| lot a fun to do"
|
| I honestly do not think anything cool has ever been built due to
| capitalism. Great ideas to great products are just musings.
| wezdog1 wrote:
| That pronunciation of Photoshop bugs me. Not everyone has an
| American accent.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I was looking for a freeish alternative for mac, but so far only
| found Photopea which is online but has an almost identical
| interface. Works pretty good basic things, but kind of bad at
| removing a background. So still searching ...
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