History of Photoshop (1)

22 years ago, a PhD student at the University of Michigan noticed that his Macintosh Plus was unable to display grayscale images — and he decided to write a program to do so. He had no idea that the program would rock the world. It was called Display — or Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop indeed rocks the world. Nowadays, almost every digital graphic pictures you see, advertisement, logo, posters, photos…etc., is designed or edited through Photoshop, which is published by famous computer software company Adobe Systems. Today, let’s take a brief review of biography of Photoshop.

Adobe and one of it’s most important family member: Photoshop

Where Story Begins

As the beginning of this article mentioned, that PhD student, Thomas Knoll, began to develop Display in 1987. Thomas’ brother John Knoll was working for Industrial Light & Magic at that time. From his experiences, John realized that Display had a huge business potential. He suggested Thomas to go deeper on the program. Display was renamed as Photoshop in 1988. Later that year, when John met Russell Brown, art director at Adobe, designing, editing, advertising, and the Internet industry was ready to PARTY! In September 1988, Adobe believed that Photoshop was a great program and decided to purchase the license to distribute Photoshop.

Finally, Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990. At that time, it designed exclusively for Macintosh.

Thomas Knoll and John Knoll (Right)

Growth and Development

From 1990 to 2002, Photoshop evolved to 7.0.1 with near 10 major releases. Photoshop 2.0 (codename Fast Eddy) came out in June 1991, after it’s success of 1.0, with bringing one of key features, Paths, to the table. After that, Photoshop updated its versions almost every year.

During this time, Photoshop developed many important features,  including Layers, History, Color Management, Extract, and Vector Shapes. The reputation and popularity of Photoshop increased, more and more professional desginers and photographers, or even households started to use Photoshop as their primary graphic designing and editing tool. Photoshop dominated the market. It became one of the most important family member of Adobe software.

It’s interesting to take a look of some historical codenames of Photoshop. Other than Fast Eddy, Photoshop’s codenames also included Merlin, Tiger Mountain, Big Electric Cat, Venus in Furs and Liquid Sky.

Adobe Photoshop, from  1.0 to 7.0

Continue on History of Photoshop (2)

~ by jtsep on September 23, 2009.