 With the power of Photoshop, almost any modern computer can be used to dramatically alter an image with shocking speed and realism. But what if we didn't have a modern computer? Or modern Photoshop? Corridor Digital apparently figures that art is the product of the artist, not of the tool, and came up with the idea of doing a visual effects challenge where the participants are forced to use the very first Adobe Photoshop, version 1.0. Their only problem is that they didn't have a machine capable of running it. Or that is to say, they didn't have any machines outdated enough to run it. Now, we can solve that, but if that was actually their only problem, this video wouldn't be over 10 minutes long, would it? So strap in, ladies and gentlemen. Just like you're gonna strap in to find out about our sponsor, Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Check out how they can keep your wallet bulged down and use offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. Photoshop 1.0 was originally released back in 1990 for the Macintosh platform, and then handed over to the Computer History Museum in 2013, including the source code. So you can actually play along at home if you like using an emulator like Basilisk 2, which incidentally is an excellent way to transfer files to and from an old-school Mac using a SCSI 2SD board. Now, of course, we didn't want to go too easy on the corridor crew, especially after our beef back in 2017. And the phenomenal performance of Apple's system 7.5.5 operating system on modern hardware would have violated the spirit of Nico's ancestral journey, in my opinion. And for that matter, so would a right mouse button. So we enlisted the help of our good friend, Brian the Electrician, who hooked us up with this Macintosh LC475, one of many sub models of the Quadra 605. Released during the Dark Ages in 1993, this is in between Steve Jobs' departure from and then later return to Apple. It's got a Motorola 68LC040 processor clocked at 25 MHz, 4 MB of onboard memory with a 16 MB expansion module installed, and 512 whole kilobytes of video memory. It took some doing to make a Mac OS image that was both bootable on our emulator and on our bare metal hardware, but with a little Linux magic, a bootloader, and an OS image, we were ready to go. Now, this computer isn't totally period correct. We originally wanted to use, oh, where'd it go? Ah, there it is, this Macintosh 2. It's got worse specs all around, but unfortunately, the magic smoke escaped from its power supply, and it's really expensive to replace, so F to pay respects. While we're at it, our SD card right here, even though it's a micro SD, is significantly faster, not to mention higher capacity than the original 250 MB 3.5-inch SCSI hard drive. But enough talk. Let's turn it on. Yay! It's still cool. Oh, right, you have to hold it. I forgot about that. Yep. Ooh, games. Okay, here we go. Kansas River crossing. We don't have $5, so... Oh, dang! Oh, wow. Linus and John, we going, boys. Okay, you've reached the big blue river crossing. Well, cocking it didn't work last time. Oh, no! Oh, my God. You lost everything. Well, I lied. We managed to finish the game. Bow bow! Bow bow bow bow bow bow! Oh, shoot. Wait, what is it? Did I die already? I think you died. Anthony also tells me some of the applications are interesting. iCab? Oh, well, that's what happens when a program crashes on Mac OS. Yeah, the whole system's gone. Wait, what? The program crashed and now the entire system needs to be restarted? Yep. How stable is Photoshop 1.0? Not too crashy. It didn't crash on me, but I would probably recommend saving often. Well, if it's anything less than perfect, that could be a significant problem for the buys down there. Can I take a moment to admire, though, that Apple automatically resumed where you left off way back then when Windows didn't add that functionality to, like, a couple years ago? That is super cool. It's a web browser! Man, Apple.com should do something special for you when you access it from, like, a machine from 30 years ago. I think it failed because it tried to redirect to HTTPS. Google should work. This is exciting. Oh, I want to get Spectre. So this is the right thing, right? Oh, it's going to HTTPS. They're all HTTPS. In the assets folder, I have a few things. So, like, images and video. Oh, cool. Oh, fun. CorridorDigital.png. Holy crap. Just opening an image. Anthony, I don't think they're going to be able to do this. Oh, wait, it wasn't corrupted before. Oh, no. Oh, my God. The whole system. Boon! You know, it's less charming after the umpteen billionth time you've done this. A few moments later. Oh, no. LTTStore.com, by the way, we've got Boxers and all kinds of great merch. But this reminds me of early Internet ****. You know, where it's like vaguely sort of skin tones, you know? You got the dithering, you got the low resolution. Yeah. You know, from here, it doesn't look that bad. If you go far enough away, it becomes retina. Not quite retina. Hold on, maybe a little farther. It's actually kind of amazing. You know, it's like art where like up close, it doesn't look like anything. But then far away, it's like, oh, yeah, that looks really good from here. What about this video, though? So what resolution is this video file, Anthony? 320 by 240. 12 frames per second. And I believe this is using Sorensen compression. I could have used motion JPEG, but it was the same performance and it looked like kind of bad. Yeah, this looks not bad. I tried interlacing it for more performance, but it didn't really help. I mean, theoretically, though, from far enough away, anything becomes retina, right? So, you know what? Big difference. If the frame rate wasn't so choppy, it would be kind of usable. Of course, the corridor guys won't be doing anything with video and they won't be using QuickTime to edit photos. Let's get to the main event. Adobe Photoshop 1.0. Wow, the launch speeds are better than the modern one. Hey, got them. Let's see if it at least performs a little better here. Oh, were you expecting that? No, not really. Had you tried opening any pictures yet? Yes, but not that long. How about 1080? 1920 by 1080, it's not that many. The timing. 640 by 480. There it is. Brightness and contrast. Oh, OK, so we can go for like a moodier look here. Wait, is it doing the whole screen? What? They're hooking into the system API so that they can give you a real time preview. The problem, though, is that modern or ancient, I don't really know how to use Photoshop. So we're going to grab a couple of our Photoshop veterans and see what they make of this. Let's see if our resident master of memes, A' can do anything with this. Have you ever used such an early version of Photoshop? No, I've never even used them from that era. I mean, these tools haven't really changed since, well, they're still pretty much the same. They've had it some, but overall, I think you still have like gradients or maybe not. That's interesting. Oh, God, is it really taking that long? Really? This is less like editing photos and more like chess, you know? Once you take your hand off of it. Yeah, so it's a gradient. Yeah, sure. Things have changed. For the better. That seems like drawing. Yes. Ah, yes. Response of times. Yeah. OK. How many undo states do I have? No, no, no, no. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, hello. Oh, oh. Oh, I'm getting another eye in my forehead face. Sounds like the kind of stuff I like to do. OK, let's do that again. OK, this is gross. Let's see where that goes. He's picking my nose. Yes, I do that in my dreams. Wait, double click on the tool. Ah, double click. Oh, right. Ah, OK. Now your pig linus. Pig sad linus. Just make sure you don't go too fast with your actions here. You got one undo state. What if we had more than one undo state? What if we don't? Disregard. OK, that's a little rough. I need help. I need to get out of this. This feels like an inkblot kind of session, you know? Like you show you show Alex this picture. It's like, what do you see? I see nightmares. What if I were to say, look, I really don't think the microphone fits the vibe of this image you're creating. Can it be removed? It doesn't seem to. That's a good skin color. Ideally, I'd be, you know, like replicating every little dot there. But there's no, I'm doing that right now. Let's draw a line there. Very, very not regular at all. Yeah, I'm talented. You know, not bad. I mean, well, OK, you made it a little worse there. I'm trying to just make this a bit more perfect. There you go. Not bad. I mean, it's bad, but it's nice to be reminded of how far things have come since as well as how not quite far they have. Some things change, some things don't. Our next contestant was born well after this software came out. It's Sarah. What am I supposed to do with this? Well, you're the artist. I seriously don't even know where to start. I mean, you're a Mac user, though, right? You daily drive Mac. So this should be no problem. Even though I'm a graphic designer, I use Photoshop rarely. So this little bar right here is still a little unfamiliar to me. I'm going to draw a mustache on you, I think. OK. Sad Linus needs a beard. We got to do an update. How's that ball mouse treating you? You ever seen a ball mouse in your life? I think I have like when I was very little. Now, when you draw on your own eyebrows, my understanding is you're supposed to delete the original ones first, right? I guess so. But how would I do that here? Whoa. It's drawing. It's a process. It takes time. Let's do a smudgey smudge. Wow, that's not bad. You actually do have eyebrows now, kind of. Yeah. Well, not to say you didn't before, but. Yeah, but now they're fresh new eyebrows. Exciting eyebrows. Exactly. OK, now you're eyebrow-less. Oh, there's another really cool feature of this computer. Check this out. It's actually got a holder for 3D printed save icons. You mean a floppy disk? Yeah, OK. Worth a shot. Hey, I was born before the 2000s, so I've still got a little bit of age on me. Just not as much as you do. Ooh, let's see what fonts we've got. It's got literally four Comic Sanses and then like eight other options. To be fair, I added the Comic Sanses. It was like pulling teeth. I'm not adding fonts. OK, I've heard New York is a good monotype, so let's try that. This is kind of an interesting panel. I like it. It's simple and clean, unlike the modern day stuff that we have. Oh, except, oh, I have to type it before it. OK. I'd love to spend a week just using this and see how good I could get at it. Would you, though? Oh, that's way too small. Let's do 150. Oops. Oh my gosh. I'm going to put in a second one. Genius. Sadlinus, Sadlinus. Every time I see the beard that I drew, it's, this looks like an album cover. Sadlinus and the Linuses. I could truly do this all day. I'm not even joking. Even with all the waiting? It would take all day. Yeah, even with the waiting, I think. I mean, listen, I sat on support calls for like eight hours straight. Music was moist. This would be moist music. Yeah, it's like, all right, hello? Yeah, no layers. That's pretty rough, hey? Yeah. It's like, OK, that text is just on there now. True. Oh my god, that lag. I mean, yeah, you got the spectral Linus in the background there. Exactly. Why is Linus sad? It's because the other Linus is sad. Exactly. I think the tool is like a minute behind you. You might want to hold off on that so the system doesn't crash. We'll give her a second to think. Oh, it could crash as you're done. Could spectral Linus be happy? Oh. OK, I see where you're going. Uh-oh. Oh, no! What have I done? Oh, it's so good. Oh, boy, you know now that you've done something, there's no undoing. That's OK. OK. There's only one undo state. Yeah, you undo and you redo. That's all you get. OK, that's fine. Lookit! We got a happy Linus now. Yeah, about that. Is there an eyedropper tool? Oh, there we go. Can we make sad Linus more sad? This is what we've reduced our literal professional creative people to. More eyebrows. Let us know if you want this on a shirt. Drawing clowns in glorified MSP. Did you just call yourself a clown? Because I'll take it. I'm going to leave it at that. There we go. OK, is this your completed masterpiece? I'd say so. I would totally go ahead and try to use this again. It has the tools that you need. It would just be way more challenging to try to create the things that we create nowadays. But yeah, I enjoyed it. Do you think Corridor will succeed in their VFX challenge? I don't know. We'll see. Enjoy that. I'll see it in my nightmares. I'll save it. Save as. I wonder what this looks like on a real computer now. I know, right? Yeah, I have no idea. Yeah, because they're not seeing the real time what it's supposed to look like, you know? Huh. Wow, yeah, I'm very curious. Of course, Nico and the rest of the Corridor crew could have easily bought a Macintosh on eBay. We still haven't really explained why they needed our help. Well, OK. To get things working as smoothly as you just saw took some doing. First, it's hard to make a video about working on a computer without capturing the screen. And unfortunately, this device predates Apple's built-in screen recording by a fair while. In fact, it's even older than QuickTime. So we had to figure out how to convert this proprietary Apple display connector to something that we can capture. Enter this little doodad. It's a dongle that converts Apple's connector to standard VGA using little dip switches to select the monitor type by adjusting the resistance and choosing which wires are used for which type of sync. The switches are currently set up for a VGA monitor with separate horizontal and vertical sync, which happens to be perfect for hooking up to the open source scan converter. To learn more about this incredible little gizmo, you can check out Anthony's short circuit video, but the TLDR is this. It can take a high quality analog signal, be it RGB or component or even SCART. Is that a SCART connector on there? SCART. Nice. And then both upscale and convert it to HDMI with virtually no delay. This gives us an extremely sharp image directly out of the Mac, which we can then pipe through an HDMI splitter out to the monitor and a capture box for simultaneous real-time capture. As you guys already saw, with the settings dialed in, it can look extremely good. Just like you can look extremely good with a sick RAM or SSD SCART from lttstore.com. Of course, Corridor probably won't be getting as clean capture as ours. That's because at 640 by 480 resolution, our machine is limited to only 256 colors. I think they're probably gonna want a little more than that. And good news, it is possible. Apple boasted support for thousands of colors, with the only catch being that you've got to drop the resolution to 512 by 384. Guys, to put that in perspective, that's the resolution of the original Macintosh from 1984. So I sincerely hope those guys like chunky pixels. Oh, on the subject of chunky pixels, get subscribed, because we're gonna get our hands on a Phillips CD-i and experience the biggest train wreck of the CD era of gaming. Finally, artists wanna focus on art, not infrastructure. So we needed to devise a way for them to get their project files on and off of this thing. Now, opening it up and pulling the boot SD card and putting it in a reader on a separate computer is an option, but it can only be read in Linux once it's formatted this way. And of course, it would require the machine to be shut down every single time. Not really ideal. Now, floppies, assuming that we could find any working ones, could work, but we're limited to very small file sizes, and they are notoriously unreliable. So instead, we opted to add an ethernet controller plugged into the processor direct slot and presto change-o-no. So you can't just plug a machine like this into a modern network and expect it to work. That would be far too simple. Old hardware like this doesn't even know what to do with modern conveniences like auto negotiation of link speeds, and it'll just keep resetting over and over and over again until we make sure that what we plug into it is exactly what it expects. And that is 10 megabits per second, half duplex. Thankfully though, even though our switch didn't allow us to configure it that way, on modern PC network cards, you can still do this. So we used internet connection sharing on a companion Windows machine to get our Mac online. From there, the easiest way to transfer files is FTP, which we're actually running on Anthony's machine over there, and we can connect to it from the Mac using fetch. It's not exactly, it just works, but it's a whole lot better than firing up Basilisk 2 and rewriting our SD card every time we wanna transfer a file. So we're calling it here. This is good enough. All that remains then is to ship the whole entire setup down to Corridor Digital and see how they fare. You know, I almost feel bad for them, except that they asked us to do this, so, haha. Anyway, thanks to the magic of video editing, you guys get to go forward in time to when they have already completed the challenge, whatever that looks like, and we're gonna have that linked in the video description. Also linked down below is our sponsor, FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the easy to use accounting software that's designed specifically with you in mind, the small business owner. FreshBooks has everything you need to manage your books. You can do invoicing, expenses, time tracking, and because it's got so much built-in automation, you can spend less time with icky-picky accounting details and more time doing what matters most, which is growing your business. So whether you're a trades person, creative agency, or YouTuber, FreshBooks has the plan that's right for you, and they have an award-winning Toronto-based support team who's always ready to help you. So try FreshBooks for free for 30 days today, no credit card required, at freshbooks.com slash Linus. Thanks again for watching, guys. Once you're done with Corridor Digital's video, why not check out our video on why I pay Adobe $10,000 a year for this software? Or, well, I mean, the newer version that's significantly more robust.