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Cire

Adobe releases the source code for Photoshop 1.0.1

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http://computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-code/
"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 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."

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Back then I always liked Paint Shop Pro. It always seemed to do more at $30. Then it went to $100 while Photoshop went to $1,000.

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Back when Real Programmers used Assembly (and Pascal).

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Cool, maybe someone'll port it to today's computers. Even if it's non-commercial, can derivatives be made off it?

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This is neat. Shame the licence means you really can't do much with it at all, though it probably would be interesting to poke at. Porting it to a modern environment could be a fun project, even if you couldn't distribute it anywhere. And really, would it actually be worth it?

I didn't know about the MacPaint code, I might poke at that also.

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Part 2 of the licence seems pretty explicit about this. Part 1 says that it's fine to modify and play with for your own use, but beyond that you can't do much. This actually feels a tad like the whole Raven licencing issue from before, and it seems like they use the same licence for software and source code.

I guess this works if all they want people to do is just poke at it and see what things were like back in the era, but it would certainly be more interesting if they had a more permissive licence. But I'm really far from someone who could give any reasonable commentary on this kind of stuff.

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Just write a patch tool that takes a local copy and modifies it in place. Or write something to emulate enough of a Macintosh for it to work.

I suppose it depends what interests potential users, though. If it's just photo-manipulation parts then those can be found elsewhere or reverse engineered and built in a newer tool. If it's the workflow or experience of using the thing then a port or some emulation is more appropriate.

Really old Macintosh software is neat for having a consistency that just didn't exist on PCs. Macs or Mac-esque systems (like the Apple IIgs) were great to use as a little kid for that reason.

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Yes, it's too bad that the license is so restrictive, however it's good to see a big company release its old abandoned source code, even if under a restrictive license. One can only hope it will become a trend more companies will take after, hopefully under more liberal licenses. I have had hope for companies like Microsoft to release the source code of their old versions of Windows, MS-DOS, or any of their programs.

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Cire said:

Yes, it's too bad that the license is so restrictive, however it's good to see a big company release its old abandoned source code, even if under a restrictive license. One can only hope it will become a trend more companies will take after, hopefully under more liberal licenses. I have had hope for companies like Microsoft to release the source code of their old versions of Windows, MS-DOS, or any of their programs.

If MS would release the source to Windows 95, you'd see some amazing things. mostly trying to get the damn thing to compile because it's a mesh of C, C++ and Assembly language.

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The Pascal code is pretty interesting. Even if it predates "Object Pascal" by a good decade or more, it actually uses Pascal's types and records to emulate a class hierarchy.

The closest you'd find today to an environment capable of "digesting" the source code is some flavour of Delphi, if you find a way to get rid of the Mac-specific dependencies (those "USES" stuff...and also a lot of the GUI stuff) and harmonize the old compiler directives (the stuff in { .. } ). Oh yeah, there are also those pesky parts written in Assembly...

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What's the point in releasing source code if you cannot do anything with it to share with others?

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Welcome to the definition of "academic reasons".

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You could write Dehacked-style patchers that modify the code in-place on end-users' systems. I'm sure they'd throw a swarm of lawyers at anyone who did something like that and made it popular for any reason, though.

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