6 ms·

Building Photoshop 1.0

159 points by nglevin 14y ago

kristofferR 14y ago
I really hope the author of this great piece shares his rare copy of MacApp 1.1 with the world, so it won't end up as another piece of lost software history only alive in our memories. This guy was incredibly lucky in finding a mostly non-corrupted floppy available for sale. In just a few years the few remaining working floppy originals will cease working and MacApp will end up as just another lost piece of software - unless pirate copies are made. You can say and think what you want about software piracy, but it's undeniable that it has saved a lot of ancient software and games from ceasing to exist in anything other than our memories. Illegal software/ROM archives have probably done more to keep the revolutionary time of the early computing/gaming history alive than all the legal old-fashioned libraries have done combined. http://www.pcworld.com/article/248571/why_history_needs_software_piracy.html?page=0 http://www.pcworld.com/article/248571/why_history_needs_soft... Thankfully there is very little enforcement of the copyright law on ancient software - and so few developers/publishers are bothered enough by the fact that someone is illegally enjoying, archiving and sharing their 10-30 year old software that they bother issuing takedown notices - that it is effectively "legal", or at least tolerated in the same way as cannabis is in the Netherlands. The fact that it won't actually be really legal until 2040-2060 is totally absurd, and a powerful testament to how outdated and irrelevant the current copyright laws are.
- yuhong 14y ago
  Yea, different duration of copyright for software is probably also a good idea.
- copx 14y ago
  "Outdated" is not the right term I would say. Assuming you are referring to US law here, the current, extremely long copyright is the result of relatively recent corporate lobbying efforts. Copyright was extended further and further at the request of powerful interests. It used to be much shorter. Originally US copyright lasted only 14 years, with a possible extension of another 14 years if the author was still alive and requested it. Nowadays US copyright lasts until 70 years after the original author's death.
  - kristofferR 14y ago
    That is inaccurate, unfortunately. Copyright has lasted way too long for over a century now. You are correct that the original US copyright law was set to the reasonable maximum of 14+14 years, however that was extended to 28+28 years already in 1909, not exactly a relatively recent development. In 1976, 35 years ago, it was further extended to 75 years after publication or 50 years after death of author. In 1998 it was extended further to an insane 120 years after creation or life + 70 years. Even if the copyright length insanity actually only was a relatively recent phenomenon from 1998, I don't see why that would exclude it from the "outdated" term.
    - jakejake 14y ago
      I had heard it was largely due to Disney. Not sure if that's true?
      - kristofferR 14y ago
        Disney lobbied heavily for the 1998 Copyright Extension Act to prevent Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, but as mentioned the copyright duration was already insanely long (70 years) by then.
- WalterBright 14y ago
  A friend of mine, Shal Farley, managed to save Empire for the PDP-11 from oblivion. He had a machine that was able to read the old 8" floppy disks, and they read perfectly. I had a magtape of PDP-10 games, but that sadly was lost.
  - WalterBright 14y ago
    I put it on github: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 I still think that PDP-11 assembler code is a thing of beauty. Here's the 1977 version of Empire written in PDP-10 FORTRAN, which I did manage to save: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10
- pifflesnort 14y ago
  Here here! I make an effort to buy old software on eBay when I come across it, archive it in a stable format scan the media, and then store the originals. It would be nice to see a project (would archive.org host it?) that applied standard archival rigor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivist) to preserving our computing history.
  - alexsb92 14y ago
    The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old software (which is mostly games as I was born in the 92), I often get stuck in making the game play nice with the current set up, regardless if I run it in compatibility mode or not. I guess I should set up some VMs with older OSes, just for this purpose. And FYI the correct expression is "Hear, Hear!" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear)
    - pifflesnort 14y ago
      > The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old software (which is mostly games as I was born in the 92), I often get stuck in making the game play nice with the current set up, regardless if I run it in compatibility mode or not. I guess I should set up some VMs with older OSes, just for this purpose. Emulators are also valuable here; the work done on bsnes is amazing, and MAME does a pretty solid job of emulating hardware (including old Mac hardware) accurately. There's also still quite a lot of retro hardware and books for sale through used markets; enough that people make it their (if not particularly lucrative) business to collect and resell 'vintage' hardware. History tends to filter out the bad ideas, such that many of the best ideas survive today. However, human's cultural filters are not perfect, and there are lots of good ideas and intellectual context that can be exceedingly valuable to understanding how things became the way they are, or demonstrating alternative paths (which may even be better than what we have today) that did not emerge for market, financial, or cultural reasons. I really find historical technology to be edifying in the same way political, musical, and broader cultural history is edifying. I think it's a shame that we don't spend as much time teaching technology/design history to software engineers as we spend training 6th graders to understand their local political/cultural history.
tambourine_man 14y ago
Writers need to study the writing of others, and usually they do. Computer programmers? not so much. Ah, c'mon. WebKit, Linux kernel?
- coldtea 14y ago
  Yes, what about them? Who studies WebKit? Or the Kernel for that matter? A minority? Because that's perfectly in line with "not so much".
  - tambourine_man 14y ago
    Who reads Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner? Your average reader will find them inscrutable. That's just how it is. Some works are simple, elegant and great. Others are hard, deep and also great. It has nothing to do with literature or code.
    - rrreese 14y ago
      The average writer will have read hundreds if not thousands of books before they write their first one. You picked some very specific authors then pointed at readers. Either you missed the point of the argument or are trying to create a straw man (or just don't understand how analogies work).
    - coldtea 14y ago
      >Who reads Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner? Your average reader will find them inscrutable. He was talking about writers though -- not average readers. And your average writer has certainly read Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Faulkner. The argument was writers vs developers (not average readers vs average users).
      - klodolph 14y ago
        > And your average writer has certainly read Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Faulkner. I seriously doubt it. I even doubt that your average lit major has read them.
kalleboo 14y ago
A cursory web search shows that the mystery "Eve" component appears to be a brand of copy protection dongle.
mamp 14y ago
I have a whole lot of floppies from that period with dev tools but I don't think I kept much MacApp stuff because it required Mac Programmers Workbench (MPW) to compile which was pretty cumbersome. I started using Consulair Mac C, then later LightSpeed Pascal and then LightSpeed C which were pretty awesome. Of course Metrowerk's CodeWarrior overtook these as the main alternative to MPW, including PowerPlant which was a sophisticated application framework. Using C for Mac development was a bit of a pain in the early days because of the stack calling differences between Pascal & C (before the declarations were built into all the compiler libraries), the conversion between pascal strings & C strings, and the work arounds to handle Pascal structure unions in C.
ayuvar 14y ago
I'm surprised I haven't seen this site before. As someone who cut his teeth on the early Mac it sure explains a lot. Not many people would write an entire blog entry about how the Mac's dynamic memory allocation worked: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/1/22_MoreMasters%3B.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
sGrabber 14y ago
It would be interesting to go through code of those days
- nearengine 14y ago
  A good chunk of it is 68k assembly, but you can check out the Pascal+asm source here: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-code/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-...
vilgax 14y ago
"Error 509: Bandwidth Limit Exceeded", can't even find in google webcache or web.archive.org. Any other way to read this?
- nglevin 14y ago
  (EDIT): Original post is too long for an HN comment. In lieu of that, here's a Pastebin cache of the original post. http://pastebin.com/LNmWc8LH http://pastebin.com/LNmWc8LH Let me know if you run into any issues. (2nd EDIT): I just updated the Pastebin cache with the original author's e-mail address, as it was in the blog. Don't mind me, I'm just the schmuck who HN-ed his server's bandwidth.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - hackmiester 14y ago
    Here is a formatted version that I created from the Google cache source code: http://ompldr.org/vaHh3bA http://ompldr.org/vaHh3bA
codemac 14y ago
I'm getting a 509 when I click on it, and the google cache didn't display anything, so I read it from source.. Does anyone have a decent mirror?
- hackmiester 14y ago
  Here is a formatted version that I created from the Google cache source code: http://ompldr.org/vaHh3bA http://ompldr.org/vaHh3bA
- akie 14y ago
  https://www.readability.com/articles/dhqfc9qw https://www.readability.com/articles/dhqfc9qw
Joeri 14y ago
I'm too young to have been aware of this part of computing history as it happened. But I did at one point go back to run photoshop 2 under emulation just to get a feel for its abilities. The amazing thing is that provided you understood the underlying mechanics of how effects like drop shadows or smoke halo's are done you could do them in photoshop 2 (and I assume version 1 as well). Instead of layers, which version 2 did not have, you would just put each "layer" in a separate image and then periodically combine them all in the right order into a target image through the filter effects. You could do reasonably modern effects on machines whose speeds were measured in mhz, not ghz. I often think about how incredibly inefficient modern software is given that we've had roughly the same level of productivity software ability (with varying levels of usability) for a few decades now. I distinctly remember my NT4 system of the late 90's, and how it was roughly as productive as my current machine, and I wonder just how much cruft is inside modern operating systems and applications.
- stinky613 14y ago
  Could you elaborate what you mean by "the same level of productivity software ability"?
  - Joeri 14y ago
    What I mean is this: When the spreadsheet software was first brought to market, it produced an order of magnitude improvement in ability to do accounting and calculations with the computer. When digital photography tools like photoshop were introduced, they produced an order of magnitude improvement in ability to do image editing. You can go down the line of categories of software, and pinpoint a rough spot where the order of magnitude jump was made. We've stopped jumping in the productivity software category. There are no order of magnitude improvements in productivity software. Each year's software release is the equivalent of city sprawl in urban planning. It grows bigger, and contains more, but it doesn't fundamentally improve the "capability". There are still huge leaps being made in software, but not on the desktop.
- alexsb92 14y ago
  > I often think about how incredibly inefficient modern software is given that we've had roughly the same level of productivity software ability (with varying levels of usability) for a few decades now. I distinctly remember my NT4 system of the late 90's, and how it was roughly as productive as my current machine, and I wonder just how much cruft is inside modern operating systems and applications. As a fellow young person (probably even younger than you), I remember watching this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 two years ago when it came out and I remember gaining quite an appreciation for all the work put in over time in Windows and the complexity that it probably brings.
rikacomet 14y ago
Google cache is not working ? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/3/30_Building_Photoshop.html&hl=en&strip=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
umurgdk 14y ago
bandwith limit XD

159 points by nglevin 14y ago

I really hope the author of this great piece shares his rare copy of MacApp 1.1 with the world, so it won't end up as another piece of lost software history only alive in our memories. This guy was incredibly lucky in finding a mostly non-corrupted floppy available for sale. In just a few years the few remaining working floppy originals will cease working and MacApp will end up as just another lost piece of software - unless pirate copies are made. You can say and think what you want about software piracy, but it's undeniable that it has saved a lot of ancient software and games from ceasing to exist in anything other than our memories. Illegal software/ROM archives have probably done more to keep the revolutionary time of the early computing/gaming history alive than all the legal old-fashioned libraries have done combined. http://www.pcworld.com/article/248571/why_history_needs_software_piracy.html?page=0 http://www.pcworld.com/article/248571/why_history_needs_soft... Thankfully there is very little enforcement of the copyright law on ancient software - and so few developers/publishers are bothered enough by the fact that someone is illegally enjoying, archiving and sharing their 10-30 year old software that they bother issuing takedown notices - that it is effectively "legal", or at least tolerated in the same way as cannabis is in the Netherlands. The fact that it won't actually be really legal until 2040-2060 is totally absurd, and a powerful testament to how outdated and irrelevant the current copyright laws are.

yuhong 14y ago
Yea, different duration of copyright for software is probably also a good idea.
copx 14y ago
"Outdated" is not the right term I would say. Assuming you are referring to US law here, the current, extremely long copyright is the result of relatively recent corporate lobbying efforts. Copyright was extended further and further at the request of powerful interests. It used to be much shorter. Originally US copyright lasted only 14 years, with a possible extension of another 14 years if the author was still alive and requested it. Nowadays US copyright lasts until 70 years after the original author's death.
- kristofferR 14y ago
  That is inaccurate, unfortunately. Copyright has lasted way too long for over a century now. You are correct that the original US copyright law was set to the reasonable maximum of 14+14 years, however that was extended to 28+28 years already in 1909, not exactly a relatively recent development. In 1976, 35 years ago, it was further extended to 75 years after publication or 50 years after death of author. In 1998 it was extended further to an insane 120 years after creation or life + 70 years. Even if the copyright length insanity actually only was a relatively recent phenomenon from 1998, I don't see why that would exclude it from the "outdated" term.
  - jakejake 14y ago
    I had heard it was largely due to Disney. Not sure if that's true?
    - kristofferR 14y ago
      Disney lobbied heavily for the 1998 Copyright Extension Act to prevent Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, but as mentioned the copyright duration was already insanely long (70 years) by then.
WalterBright 14y ago
A friend of mine, Shal Farley, managed to save Empire for the PDP-11 from oblivion. He had a machine that was able to read the old 8" floppy disks, and they read perfectly. I had a magtape of PDP-10 games, but that sadly was lost.
- WalterBright 14y ago
  I put it on github: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 I still think that PDP-11 assembler code is a thing of beauty. Here's the 1977 version of Empire written in PDP-10 FORTRAN, which I did manage to save: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10
pifflesnort 14y ago
Here here! I make an effort to buy old software on eBay when I come across it, archive it in a stable format scan the media, and then store the originals. It would be nice to see a project (would archive.org host it?) that applied standard archival rigor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivist) to preserving our computing history.
- alexsb92 14y ago
  The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old software (which is mostly games as I was born in the 92), I often get stuck in making the game play nice with the current set up, regardless if I run it in compatibility mode or not. I guess I should set up some VMs with older OSes, just for this purpose. And FYI the correct expression is "Hear, Hear!" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear)
  - pifflesnort 14y ago
    > The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old software (which is mostly games as I was born in the 92), I often get stuck in making the game play nice with the current set up, regardless if I run it in compatibility mode or not. I guess I should set up some VMs with older OSes, just for this purpose. Emulators are also valuable here; the work done on bsnes is amazing, and MAME does a pretty solid job of emulating hardware (including old Mac hardware) accurately. There's also still quite a lot of retro hardware and books for sale through used markets; enough that people make it their (if not particularly lucrative) business to collect and resell 'vintage' hardware. History tends to filter out the bad ideas, such that many of the best ideas survive today. However, human's cultural filters are not perfect, and there are lots of good ideas and intellectual context that can be exceedingly valuable to understanding how things became the way they are, or demonstrating alternative paths (which may even be better than what we have today) that did not emerge for market, financial, or cultural reasons. I really find historical technology to be edifying in the same way political, musical, and broader cultural history is edifying. I think it's a shame that we don't spend as much time teaching technology/design history to software engineers as we spend training 6th graders to understand their local political/cultural history.

tambourine_man 14y ago

Writers need to study the writing of others, and usually they do. Computer programmers? not so much. Ah, c'mon. WebKit, Linux kernel?

coldtea 14y ago
Yes, what about them? Who studies WebKit? Or the Kernel for that matter? A minority? Because that's perfectly in line with "not so much".
- tambourine_man 14y ago
  Who reads Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner? Your average reader will find them inscrutable. That's just how it is. Some works are simple, elegant and great. Others are hard, deep and also great. It has nothing to do with literature or code.
  - rrreese 14y ago
    The average writer will have read hundreds if not thousands of books before they write their first one. You picked some very specific authors then pointed at readers. Either you missed the point of the argument or are trying to create a straw man (or just don't understand how analogies work).
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >Who reads Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner? Your average reader will find them inscrutable. He was talking about writers though -- not average readers. And your average writer has certainly read Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Faulkner. The argument was writers vs developers (not average readers vs average users).
    - klodolph 14y ago
      > And your average writer has certainly read Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Faulkner. I seriously doubt it. I even doubt that your average lit major has read them.

kalleboo 14y ago

A cursory web search shows that the mystery "Eve" component appears to be a brand of copy protection dongle.

mamp 14y ago

I have a whole lot of floppies from that period with dev tools but I don't think I kept much MacApp stuff because it required Mac Programmers Workbench (MPW) to compile which was pretty cumbersome. I started using Consulair Mac C, then later LightSpeed Pascal and then LightSpeed C which were pretty awesome. Of course Metrowerk's CodeWarrior overtook these as the main alternative to MPW, including PowerPlant which was a sophisticated application framework. Using C for Mac development was a bit of a pain in the early days because of the stack calling differences between Pascal & C (before the declarations were built into all the compiler libraries), the conversion between pascal strings & C strings, and the work arounds to handle Pascal structure unions in C.

ayuvar 14y ago

I'm surprised I haven't seen this site before. As someone who cut his teeth on the early Mac it sure explains a lot. Not many people would write an entire blog entry about how the Mac's dynamic memory allocation worked: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/1/22_MoreMasters%3B.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

sGrabber 14y ago

It would be interesting to go through code of those days

nearengine 14y ago
A good chunk of it is 68k assembly, but you can check out the Pascal+asm source here: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-code/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-...

vilgax 14y ago

"Error 509: Bandwidth Limit Exceeded", can't even find in google webcache or web.archive.org. Any other way to read this?

nglevin 14y ago
(EDIT): Original post is too long for an HN comment. In lieu of that, here's a Pastebin cache of the original post. http://pastebin.com/LNmWc8LH http://pastebin.com/LNmWc8LH Let me know if you run into any issues. (2nd EDIT): I just updated the Pastebin cache with the original author's e-mail address, as it was in the blog. Don't mind me, I'm just the schmuck who HN-ed his server's bandwidth.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- hackmiester 14y ago
  Here is a formatted version that I created from the Google cache source code: http://ompldr.org/vaHh3bA http://ompldr.org/vaHh3bA

codemac 14y ago

I'm getting a 509 when I click on it, and the google cache didn't display anything, so I read it from source.. Does anyone have a decent mirror?

hackmiester 14y ago
Here is a formatted version that I created from the Google cache source code: http://ompldr.org/vaHh3bA http://ompldr.org/vaHh3bA
akie 14y ago
https://www.readability.com/articles/dhqfc9qw https://www.readability.com/articles/dhqfc9qw

Joeri 14y ago

I'm too young to have been aware of this part of computing history as it happened. But I did at one point go back to run photoshop 2 under emulation just to get a feel for its abilities. The amazing thing is that provided you understood the underlying mechanics of how effects like drop shadows or smoke halo's are done you could do them in photoshop 2 (and I assume version 1 as well). Instead of layers, which version 2 did not have, you would just put each "layer" in a separate image and then periodically combine them all in the right order into a target image through the filter effects. You could do reasonably modern effects on machines whose speeds were measured in mhz, not ghz. I often think about how incredibly inefficient modern software is given that we've had roughly the same level of productivity software ability (with varying levels of usability) for a few decades now. I distinctly remember my NT4 system of the late 90's, and how it was roughly as productive as my current machine, and I wonder just how much cruft is inside modern operating systems and applications.

stinky613 14y ago
Could you elaborate what you mean by "the same level of productivity software ability"?
- Joeri 14y ago
  What I mean is this: When the spreadsheet software was first brought to market, it produced an order of magnitude improvement in ability to do accounting and calculations with the computer. When digital photography tools like photoshop were introduced, they produced an order of magnitude improvement in ability to do image editing. You can go down the line of categories of software, and pinpoint a rough spot where the order of magnitude jump was made. We've stopped jumping in the productivity software category. There are no order of magnitude improvements in productivity software. Each year's software release is the equivalent of city sprawl in urban planning. It grows bigger, and contains more, but it doesn't fundamentally improve the "capability". There are still huge leaps being made in software, but not on the desktop.
alexsb92 14y ago
> I often think about how incredibly inefficient modern software is given that we've had roughly the same level of productivity software ability (with varying levels of usability) for a few decades now. I distinctly remember my NT4 system of the late 90's, and how it was roughly as productive as my current machine, and I wonder just how much cruft is inside modern operating systems and applications. As a fellow young person (probably even younger than you), I remember watching this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 two years ago when it came out and I remember gaining quite an appreciation for all the work put in over time in Windows and the complexity that it probably brings.

rikacomet 14y ago

Google cache is not working ? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/3/30_Building_Photoshop.html&hl=en&strip=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

umurgdk 14y ago

bandwith limit XD