Photoshop’s 20th Birthday!

February 10th, 2010 By Rjene

It was 1999 when I first tried my hand on Photoshop. It was Photoshop 6.0 and I was utterly amazed by what it can do - graphics, photo editing, coloring. It became a hobby, a favorite tool to draw and play with photos, create and design web templates - a very cool toy. I didn’t know back then that it’ll change my life.

After some 10 years, with mostly self-taught web technology skills and design knowledge, my hobby had turn into work opportunities and an actual career. I’ve tried other image editors (Corel Draw, Gimp) but my hands now do look for the tools and ease of use I’ve become accustomed to in Photoshop.

Thanks to Thomas Knoll, with the encouragement and recommendations of his brother John Knoll, we have Adobe Photoshop (jobs) today. ~

Cheers to Photoshop’s 20th Anniversary! ^_^

Early History from Wikipedia
In 1987, Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a “total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped” this way.

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.

Share It!