Everyone ● Photoshop (Version 1.0) ~128,000 LOC by Knoll Brothers ● Linux Kernel (Version 1.0)…
everyone ● Photoshop (Version 1.0) ~128,000 LOC by Knoll Brothers ● Linux Kernel (Version 1.0) ~176,000 LOC Linus Torvalds & Contributors Nowadays we write this much code in a few days ! With the help of AI and etc .
What a development !
Context
The Computer History Museum's post says the released Photoshop code is the 1990 version 1.0.1, with 179 files and about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented code, excluding the MacApp library licensed from Apple, mostly Pascal with 68000 machine language. Thomas Knoll was the sole engineer on version 1 and John Knoll wrote plug-ins. LWN's kernel size table lists Linux 1.0 of 13 March 1994 at 176,250 lines and 4,719,743 bytes. CNET repeats the 128,000 figure.
The Photoshop count is for version 1.0.1, so the note's version 1.0 is a small mismatch, and it excludes MacApp. The LWN table does not state its counting method, so the two counts may not be like-for-like across languages, comments and whitespace. Roughly 176,000 matches the table. We now write this much code in a few days with AI is the author's opinion, with no evidence found.
Related work
- Photoshop 1.0 source code now a museum artifact (CNET) ↗Secondary.
- CHM catalog entry ↗Snippet only.
Watch next
- A like-for-like line count with the same tool and file types.
Sources
- Adobe Photoshop source code (Computer History Museum)computerhistory.org
- Linux kernel size history (LWN)lwn.net
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 14 September 2026 at 02:56 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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