You are looking at a reconstruction of the first publicly shipped version of the world's first widely-used image-editing program — the one that, after 1990, changed every magazine cover and eventually the word "photograph" itself.
The chrome, menus, and tools are reconstructed from the published 1.0.1 source code, the 1990 user guide, and contemporary screenshots. Every menu item that appears here was actually in 1.0 — Duotone, Lab, paths, and layers all arrived in later versions.
Painting: pencil, brush, airbrush, eraser, bucket fill. Pick a tool from the toolbox and draw on the canvas.
Selection: marquee, lasso, magic wand. Selections constrain painting and filtering to a region.
Filters: Filter > Blur, Blur More, Sharpen, Sharpen More, Find Edges, Mosaic, Diffuse, Add Noise are wired. The rest are present as period-accurate menu items but inert.
Image adjust: Image > Invert, Threshold, Posterize, Equalize, Brightness/Contrast, Flip, Rotate are wired.
Undo: Edit > Undo — only one level, faithful to 1.0. Use the Rooms menu at the top right to switch to another cartridge.
1987. Thomas Knoll is a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan. He writes a small Pascal program on his Macintosh Plus — black-and-white screen, 1-bit, no grays — that can display grayscale images on a monochrome monitor. He calls it Display.
His brother John Knoll, working at Industrial Light & Magic, sees what Display could become. He pushes Thomas to turn the viewer into an editor.
1988: Thomas takes a six-month break from his dissertation. The brothers rename it ImagePro — the name is already taken — then PhotoShop, capital S.
Before Adobe, before the version 1.0 you are looking at, there was a deal with a small scanner company.
March 1989. Barneyscan, a slide-scanner manufacturer, bundles a pre-release of PhotoShop with their hardware as Barneyscan XP. Roughly 200 copies ship this way. This is the first time the public touches the program — not as a product, but as a free pack-in with very expensive imaging hardware.
The image on your canvas is, in spirit, what those 200 first users opened.
1988. John Knoll flies to Silicon Valley and demos the program to two audiences: engineers at Apple, and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe.
Adobe is already the PostScript company, already the Illustrator company. September 1988: they buy a license to distribute. Thomas keeps coding from Ann Arbor; John builds plug-ins from California.
The product ships eighteen months later. February 19, 1990. The menu bar above is exactly the one that arrived in the box.
The toolbox to the left is the entire painting and selection vocabulary. Marquee, lasso, magic wand — three ways to ask the program, "this part, not that part."
Pick the pencil and draw on the canvas. Pick the airbrush and hold the mouse to build up density. Pick the bucket and flood-fill an enclosed region. These tool behaviors are the ones the 1990 user learned — and almost every one survives, virtually unchanged, in the program's descendants thirty-six years later.
Open the Filter menu. What you see is the actual 1.0 list — flat, no submenu hierarchy. The Blur ▸ Distort ▸ etc. categories arrived in 2.0.
Every one of those filters was a separate file the application loaded at launch. Anyone could write one. John Knoll wrote six himself. The Aldus Toolbox modules slotted in the same way.
Try Blur, Find Edges, Mosaic, Diffuse, Add Noise. The others are present as historical accuracy but not wired up in this recreation.
One undo. Look at the Edit menu — a single Undo line. You committed, or you reverted the whole step. Apply a filter, hate it, undo. Apply another. The second undo will take you back to the first filter, not the original. This is faithful.
No layers. Every pixel sat on the same plane. If you painted over something, it was gone.
No filter preview. You picked Mosaic, you guessed a cell size, you waited, you saw the result. The dialogs in this recreation make the same offer.
Layers arrive in 1994, with version 3.0. Until then, this is the room.
Adobe priced version 1.0 at $895. Roughly $2,200 in today's dollars, for software, on a single 800K floppy.
The context: a high-end Scitex retouching workstation cost a printshop around $300 per hour to operate. A magazine cover involved freight, schedules, a dedicated operator. PhotoShop at $895 ran on a Macintosh II at the low end of the line — five to six thousand dollars depending on the configuration — on the art director's desk, all weekend if needed.
That is what "democratization" actually meant. Not free. Just radically cheaper than the alternative.
Version 2.0 (June 1991): the pen tool, paths, Duotone mode, and CMYK editing.
Version 2.5 (November 1992): first Windows release. HSL and HSB modes are removed.
Version 3.0 (1994): layers, plus Lab color mode. The single most important feature ever added to the program.
Future recreations in this series will pick up at 3.0. For now, you are in the room before that door opened.
If you want to draw, not retouch, the room next door is gesture — a current-decade sketch tool by the same hand that built this museum. Pressure-sensitive brushes, spline auto-fit, a session timer for figure-drawing, and an idle-watching conduit that quietly upscales your marks into reference images. The descent from raster-paint to drawing-with-intent, four decades on.
From THE LITERATURE · CANON / 001B · the theory wing of CLASSICERY. Hear Alvy Ray Smith on A Pixel Is Not a Little Square read aloud — → track 16 →
→ CANON3 · track 13 · optical flow · the machine reads motion it was never told
→ CANON5 · track 13 · diffusion · an image dreamed out of noise