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 won’t 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 theyÂ’d 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 dad’s 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 everyone’s hard drive today....
Make a jump over at Computer Arts for further read.