Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code featured image

The Start of Something Huge

Imagine a time before you could just filter your photos with a single tap. In 1990, two brothers named Thomas and John Knoll changed everything. They released the Adobe Photoshop 1.0 source code to the world, and digital photos were never the same. Looking at this old code today is pretty cool because it shows how much you can do with a little bit of math and a lot of patience.

The code was eventually shared through the Computer History Museum. It's a great spot for anyone who wants to see how software was built when every single byte of memory mattered. You can also check out our latest updates for more cool stories about tech history.

What makes this code special?

The Adobe Photoshop 1.0 source code isn't like the apps we have now. There were no layers or fancy smart objects. It was a simple tool for fixing images, but the logic behind it was brilliant. Here are a few things that might surprise you about it:

Almost all of it was written in Pascal, a language that isn't used much anymore.
It had to fit on a floppy disk, which barely holds any data by today's standards.
It was built specifically for the Macintosh platform.

If you want to see the full timeline of the app, you can visit the Adobe Photoshop Wikipedia page. It’s wild to see how far things have come since that first release.

Can you still use it?

You can't really run this code on a modern Windows PC or Mac without a lot of extra work. It’s mostly there so people can learn from it. If you're looking for more ways to learn about software, take a look at our helpful resources. The Adobe Photoshop 1.0 source code is a piece of history that every developer should see at least once.