The next time you fire up your copy of Photoshop, spare
a thought for the scores of developers and the reams of code that
have gone into making it
While you wont find it printed on any calendar, 2005 marks a quiet
anniversary for the program that you, and many other graphic
designers, probably use the most. It was 15 years ago in February
that Adobe shipped version 1.0 of Photoshop still its most
popular (and lucrative) application, and possibly the only bit of
software to have spawned its own verb form.
But the true origins of Photoshop go back even further. The program
whose splash screen now displays 41 names was originally the
product of just two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll, as fascinated
by technology as they were by art. It was a trait theyd inherited
from their father, a photography buff with his own personal
darkroom in the basement and a penchant for early home
computers.
Thus Thomas dabbled with photography, learning about colour
correction and contrast in the darkroom, while John happily
tinkered with his dads Apple II computer. When their dad clearly
an early adopter bought one of the first Macs on the market in
1984, both were bowled over by its capabilities. Yet ironically it
was its frustrating inadequacies that would eventually lead to the
multi-million dollar application sitting on nearly everyones hard
drive today....
Make a jump over at Computer Arts for further
read.
