You are looking at a reconstruction of the first commercially shipped version of the world's first widely-used vector graphics program — the one that, after January 1987, made the curve a programmable thing.
The chrome, the menus, the toolbox of thirteen tools are reconstructed from contemporary screenshots, primary-source developer accounts, and museum-archived box copy. Every tool in the palette was actually in 1.0/1.1; the Freehand tool came in Illustrator 88, the Auto Trace tool also.
Pen tool: click to add anchors. Click-and-drag for smooth (Bézier) anchors. The path is committed when you switch to another tool or close it.
Shape tools: Rectangle, Ellipse. Click-drag on the canvas to draw.
Selection tool: click on a path's outline to select the path; drag to reposition. Once a path is selected, its anchor squares appear — click any anchor and drag to move just that anchor (handles travel with it). This is the period's single-tool way of doing what later Illustrator split into the white Direct-Selection arrow.
Transform tools: Scale, Rotate, Reflect, Shear are one-shot transforms applied to the selected path around its centroid (1.25×, 15°, horizontal flip, 0.15 shear per click). Compound them by clicking repeatedly.
View modes: View > Art Only / Preview. Window > New Window opens a second viewport.
Undo: Edit > Undo — one level. Use the Rooms menu at the top right to switch cartridges.
By 1986 Adobe had two products: PostScript, the page description language, and Type 1 fonts. No applications. The company existed to sell a technology to printer manufacturers and font foundries.
Then John Warnock — Adobe co-founder, PostScript's inventor — looked at the Bézier curve machinery Adobe's in-house font tools used and thought: this could be a drawing program.
Development began in 1985. Codename: Picasso. The application was, at its heart, a graphical front-end to PostScript. Many of its menu commands and dialog box settings mapped directly to PostScript operators.
Pierre Bézier worked at Renault in the 1960s and needed a way to describe the curve of a car's body so the metal-stamping machinery could understand it. His insight: any smooth curve can be described by four points — two endpoints and two "handles" that pull the curve into shape.
This is what Illustrator 1.0 ran on. Click an anchor — that's a corner. Click-and-drag — handles appear, and the line becomes smooth. The math runs in your browser right now in this recreation, identical to how it ran on a Mac Plus in 1987.
Try it. Pick the pen tool. Click around the apple template. Click-drag where the curve should be smooth.
The toolbox to the left has thirteen tools. Every one of them is still in Illustrator thirty-nine years later. Selection, Hand, Zoom, Pen, Type, Rectangle, Ellipse, Scissors, Scale, Rotate, Reflect, Shear, and the Page Tool.
Notice what is missing. No Freehand tool — that arrived in Illustrator 88, the next year. No Auto Trace — also 88. No Pencil. No Brush. No anything that approximates an analogue drawing implement. This was a tool for people who thought in geometry.
Try View > Preview Illustration, or Window > New Window.
In 1.0 you could not see what you were drawing. The editing window showed only wireframe — anchors, handles, paths as one-pixel lines. To see fills and strokes you had to open a second window on the same document. You watched your changes update there as you edited in the first window.
The first Mac version that let you edit in preview mode was Illustrator 5.0, in 1993. Six years of vector drawing happened in pure wireframe.
The original box included a VHS tape. On the tape: John Warnock himself, white-shirted, walking through Illustrator 1.0 in front of a Mac Plus.
Mid-demo, he traces an apple with the pen tool. Four anchor points around the body, one for the stem, three for the leaf. Each smooth anchor a click and a drag. When the curve closes, the apple appears as a black silhouette in the second window. Warnock pauses, looks at the camera, and says: "Isn't that neat?"
The apple template on your canvas is for you to do the same.
No color. Output was black and white, printed to a PostScript LaserWriter or saved as an EPS for a typesetter to drop into a layout.
No layers. Every path lived on a single plane. Stacking was z-order, controlled by Bring to Front and Send to Back in the Arrange menu.
No composite paths. A donut had to be drawn as two separate paths overlaid. Compound paths arrived in 88.
One font per text block. The Type menu's Font submenu picked a single font for the entire selected text. Mixed fonts within a block was 3.0 territory.
No convert-to-outlines. Type stayed editable as type until you printed.
The hidden splash screen credits for 1.1 read:
Mike Schuster
Bill Paxton
John Warnock
V. 1.1 · 3/19/1987
Bill Paxton — the engineer, not the actor — had come up through Doug Engelbart's NLS group at SRI and later Xerox PARC before joining Adobe. Mike Schuster wrote the core engine. Warnock conceived and shepherded and demoed.
Adobe Illustrator 1.1 shipped on March 19, 1987. The bug-fix release. The version most people actually used.
Illustrator 88 (1988): Freehand tool, Auto Trace tool, color preview on color monitors, Pantone library, Place EPS images, patterns, shape blends, Adobe Separator for color separation.
Illustrator 3.0 (1990): Adobe Type Manager (Type 1 fonts displayed crisply on screen at any size), type directly on the document, text along a path, charts and graphs.
Illustrator 4.0 (1992): Windows version, grids, edit-in-preview on Windows.
Illustrator 5.0 (1993): layers, edit-in-preview on the Mac. Eighty-eight months after 1.0.
Future vitrines in this museum may pick up at 3.0 or 5.0. For now you are in the room where the curve was first programmable.
If you want to draw a Bezier curve in the air instead of on a screen, the room next door is Trace — hand pinching in front of a webcam, the curve appears. Single HTML page, no headset, no install. The intuition of mid-air drawing without the VR helmet that usually carries it.
From THE LITERATURE · CANON / 001B · the theory wing of CLASSICERY. Hear Pierre Bézier and Paul de Casteljau on Outillage Méthodes Calcul / Procédé de définition numérique read aloud — → track 05 →
→ CANON3 · track 11 · the blend · the tween comes to the designer’s desk