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Comment by pmcjones | Hacker News Reader

In the aughts I worked at Adobe and spent time trying to archive the source code for Photoshop, Illustrator, PostScript, and other apps. Thomas Knoll's original Mac floppy disk backups were available, so I brought in my Mac Plus, with a serial cable to transfer the files to a laptop via Kermit. The first version was 0.54, dated 6 July 1988. The files on the floppies were in various ancient compressed archive formats, but most were readable. I created an archive on a special Perforce server of all the code that I found. Sadly, the earliest Illustrator backups were on a single external disk drive that had gone bad.

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Thank you for your service. Super cool project. Hopefully they make their way to archive.org or Github someday.

Adobe has the only copy, and they have donated early versions of PostScript (https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printi...) and Photoshop; people should ask Adobe to release more. Everything I find in the public domain I post at https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects .

isn't the topic the Patents, not the code? The code is mired in Mac toolbox details, no?

Even the parents from 1988-2000 would be well expired now

Poor moms and dads.

Can you patent open-source code?

Of course you can. If you invented it, and nobody else has patented it, you can patent it. Opening the source doesn’t invalidate your rights as an inventor or copyright holder, though it can add confusion and/or complexity to the enforcement of both the patent and the open source license.

Yes, but my understanding is that publically detailing how your invention works _before_ trying to patent it means the invention becomes public knowledge/prior art. That is, so long as you submit a patent application before releasing the open-source code, it should be OK, but there's no much you can do once the cat is out of the bag.

I imagine the rules and best practices would vary between jurisdictions, but basically yeah. But as soon as you file for the patent, you can release source and enjoy the confusion.

(Based on 30 seconds of googling, it seems that the USA and Australia gives inventors a 1 year grace period after publishing, but the granted patent might not be valid in other countries.)

USA also used to not consider publications or patents published outside USA as prior art, to the point of granting patents that were rewritten from someone else's patent in another country.

Not sure if it got better or worse with WTO patent rules.

Considering the history of NAND flash amounts to Toshiba applying to Japan's patent office and getting laughed out of the room, then Sandisk saw it and applied for and received a patent for NAND flash from the US Patent Office, it's probably still the case.

Arguably patents as intended should require description of patented device/technique in detail that allows replicating it - effectively open sourcing it.

The patent then serves as temporary moat on applying that specific technique or producing that specific device to refund the inventor.

In practice... well, sometimes patents were used to recover details of closed-source software or hardware.

Patents expire after 20 years at most, I believe. Everything from before 2004 has expired already.

Wow are you the one that posted the original LISP 1.5 source code? I colorized that and used it to good effect in my blog posts. https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/#listing

I beat the bushes for the source code, documenting my finds (https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/category/lisp/) and posting them (https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/lisp15_fa...), but the early work was done by Jack Harper, Pascal Bourguignon, Rich Cornwell and Bob Abeles, Andru Luvisi, Angelo Papenhoff, Al Kossow, and others.

the Illustrator guy was in Palo Alto and approachable .. at the time the feedback was that the interface interactions were not great .. hard to say now, but Freehand became popular quickly, then folded.

Mike Schuster, who by the way is a superb programmer.

Freehand still hasn't been beat, even after all these years. Never did like Illustrator, but like everyone learned to use it once Freehand bit the dust.

I hadn't thought about Freehand in a decade and now I'm angry at Adobe for killing it all over again. It never got in your way and let you fully focus on your work. Illustrator never lets you forget that you're using a tool to create things like Freehand did.

Is there some good summary somewhere? I remember having, ahem, access to both as a teen but Illustrator had more brand effect behind it.

This mid-'90s time capsule and the decade-plus of comments below it summarize how a lot of Freehand users felt about the program: https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/illustrator-v-freehand.html.

Thank you for fighting the good fight, Paul. We miss you and Alex around here.

Wow, oddly enough that kind of sounds quite fun.

That's awesome.

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