This repository is an ongoing archival project for early Processing releases. These pre, alpha, and beta versions of Processing were initially released between the years 2001 and 2005.
We believe these legacy versions and their release notes have historical value and are worth preserving. If you would like to help our conservation efforts, or if this work was helpful to you, get in touch!
Note
If you are looking for the latest version of Processing go to the Processing download page
You can access and download the original revisions folder containing all binaries here.
Re-releases on GitHub (WIP)
To make these files easier to navigate, we will also be uploading the binaries for each version as releases on this repository.
Head to the Releases and locate the release you want to download. Check the file extension to identify the correct version for your operating system: macOS (hqx, dmg, sit, sitx), Windows (zip, exe), or Unix systems (tgz).
Warning
GitHub automatically creates two extra files called Source code (zip) and Source code (tar.gz). These files were not part of the original release and you may safely ignore them.
The versions of Processing featured on this repository were released between 2001 and 2005. These legacy releases are provided "as is", bugs and all, for their historical value and to support conservation efforts. Many of these versions were unstable or had various issues, often released in quick succession to fix bugs from previous versions. For technical details, refer to the included release notes, and check the release dates for an idea of each version's stability. We do not provide support or bug fixes for these very early versions of Processing. However, if you find a problem with this repository, such as a corrupted archive, or a wrong file in a release, please file an issue.
The archival process is a work in progress, starting with processing-0001.sit (pre-release) and working all the way up to processing-0104-expert.zip (beta release). In total this is 287 individual files to upload, tag, and check by hand. If you want to help this archival effort, please contact [email protected].
If you do run these on original hardware, please share your process and a video or a photo on the Processing forum. We'd love to see it!
Past versions of the Processing forum are also archived. You can find them at https://forum.processing.org/. This includes the alpha forum, which was active from 2002 to 2005, concurrently with most of the releases this repository aims to preserve.
The Processing website was originally hosted at proce55ing.net. Archives going back to 2001 can be found on archive.org.
- A Modern Prometheus: A History of Processing by Casey Reas and Ben Fry
- Processing: the Software that Shaped Creative Coding on AIGA Eye on Design
- Interview with Casey Reas and Ben Fry by Daniel Shiffman for Rhizome
- How Computer Code Became a Modern Design Medium—an Oral History on AIGA Eye on Design
- The Power of Processing An interview with Casey Reas and Lauren Lee McCarthy by Alex Estorick for Right Click Save
- Code, Community, and Creativity in Processing by Tibor Udvari
Thanks to Ben Fry and Casey Reas for creating Processing!
Thanks to Dave Pagurek for prompting me to dig up these files.
For inquiries about this archival effort, please write to [email protected]
For any other inquiries, contact [email protected]
For detailed licensing information about Processing, see https://github.com/processing/processing4/blob/main/LICENSE.md
All credit for the content of this repository go to the original authors.
