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For Your Inspection: Source Code For Photoshop 1.0

Posted by timothy on from the time-delay dept.

gbooch writes "With the permission of Adobe Systems, the Computer History Museum has made available the source code for Photoshop version 1.0.1, comprising about 128,000 lines of code within 179 files, most of which is in Pascal, the remainder in 68000 assembly language. This the kind of code I aspire to write. The Computer History Museum has earlier made available the source code to MacPaint."

5 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I managed to get it, and WOW. It seems programmers in the olden days had a bit higher quality standards than the current league of script kiddies.

    There's not a single superfluous abstraction. Every performance trick is applied. And yet, everything is totally readable.

    Amazing.

  2. when software was fast... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...and good. I miss those times.

    I miss stuff which opened instantly and worked quickly. Where a faster PC actually meant things getting done quicker, rather than an opportunity to shim in another layer of crapware designed by a 3rd party half way across the world to find its way into your ever-less-steady stack of shit.

    Windows 95 on a PC from 2000 runs way faster than XP on a 2010 PC, and both are faster than Windows Vista/7/8 on a modern PC. Why don't people make that effort any more? It's not as if using shitty pre-built components saves development time: learning all their quirks and bugs is often more time-consuming than just rewriting from scratch. Is it just that Twenty-First Century Capitalism thing where every useless leech has to take a cut, so it would be Unholy to properly develop in-house and on-shore?

    1. Re:when software was fast... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You miss the point. You shouldn't need 8GB of ram and an SSD just so a typical application can seem snappy. It is great that that such technology is available and affordable today, but that may not always be the case.

      Having programed on computers with as little as 4k of ram, 8GB just seems insane. Nobody should need that unless they are running something like an enterprise database, doing atomic modeling of a nuclear explosion, or running an FPS that is more realistic than going outside and shooting people.

    2. Re:when software was fast... by pclminion · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It's easy for dipshits to sit around bitching about what a computer "ought to be able to do." Oddly enough, none of them seem to be out there actually developing software which lives up to these expectations. I wonder why that is.

  3. Re:Aspirations by DJCouchyCouch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I love tapioca!