Happy B'Day Photoshop
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Ponder This
The application that can turn a normal woman into a supermodel and equip her with one, two and even three hands is no longer a teenager. This February Photoshop turns 20. Congrats! You've come a long way from the idea of a lonesome nerd to Macs and PCs all over the world. And because nerds love useless knowledge to brag about, here's a brief insight into some IT history.
The first version was developed by Thomas Knoll, a computer science student who was writing his dissertation in 1987. He needed an application to view images on the black-and-white(!!) display of his Macintosh Plus (That thing was so cute!). So, like any good programmer he didn't wasted his time searching one, he just coded it himself and named it 'Display'. After he told his brother John about the little app, he wanted to join him in order to take it to the next level. John was working for ILM at that time and needed a program to work with colored images and different file formats. So the first thing they did, was buy new Macs with color displays.
During the next 2 years they improved the capabilities of the application and tried to sell it to a company. An early version was sold bundled with a printer under the name 'ImagePro' in 1988. Meanwhile John used it for some effects for the movie 'The Abyss' which later got an Oscar for 'best visual effects'.
In 1989 they finally sold the license rights to Adobe and released Photoshop 1.0 in February 1990 exclusively for macs. The rest is history…
Here's a pretty interesting interview with John Knoll shot at ILM. He's talking about the process of developing and selling 'Photoshop' but also about his old macs, the RAM drives he used and the current trend towards 3D. Enjoy!