“Download Photoshop legally for free…” Those are the words that geeks have been wanting to hear for over two decades. The good news is that it has finally come true. The bad news is that it’s the original Photoshop source code that has been released.
According to the Computer History Museum:
With the permission of Adobe Systems Inc., the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop. All the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple. There are 179 files in the zipped folder, comprising about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented but well-structured code. By line count, about 75% of the code is in Pascal, about 15% is in 68000 assembler language, and the rest is data of various sorts.
Nearly 130k lines of code written almost entirely by Photoshop co-founder Thomas Knoll are now available for vintage geeks to explore the nostalgic wonders of a software that changed the world and made lolcats possible.
