Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Happy 20th Birthday Adobe Photoshop

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-19-2010, 08:47 AM:

The title says it. On Feb 19, 1990 Adobe released the first version of Adobe Photoshop. The commercial version grew from a little piece of software written by Thomas Knoll called "Display." Thomas and his brother, John Knoll (a visual effects expert at Industrial Light and Magic) built upon it, Adobe bought the rights to it and then the rest is history. John Knoll still works at ILM and Thomas has helped drive Photoshop's improvements over the years.

Photoshop's improvements have also required ever more disc space. Version 2.5 fit on only four 3.5" floppy discs and installed in just a couple minutes. Now Photoshop CS4 Extended consumes roughly 1GB of hard disc space. The Adobe Production Studio CS4 installer fills 4 DVD-ROM discs and takes over an hour to install.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-19-2010, 10:06 AM:

Photoshop CS4 by itself probably installs faster than the one on 4 3.5" floppy disks. Those things were slooow. They read, like, 4KB per second. At least that's what it seemed like. Then there is switching the disks, the hyper slow 15rpm computer hard drive, etc.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 02-19-2010, 10:29 AM:

Actually, somewhere around the late 1990's, Adobe bought a Windows 3.1 competing product, Aldis Photostyler, which they renamed to Photoshop and adding a few features from their old Photoshop product.

I don't know what is under the hood, whether they just took the user interface from Photostyler, or the entire underlying engine, but the photoshop interface was almost identical starting in 1998 to the defunct Aldis product.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-19-2010, 10:39 AM:

Bobby, post screenshots from each version!

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-19-2010, 02:09 PM:

I'm not sure if I could even get the old versions to install. About the best I could do is show a pile of Adobe software boxes or disc cases/sleeves.

Regarding Aldus PhotoStyler, that was an early 1990s application originally developed by ULead and acquired by Aldus. Version 1.1 was one of the first applications to allow full color bitmap image manipulation on the Windows platform (Photoshop 1.0 and Photoshop 2.0 were Mac-only releases if I remember correctly).

I only have vague memories of seeing PhotoStyler in action. One marketing firm in North Dallas where I worked in 1993 had it and Aldus PageMaker installed on a couple of machines. I don't remember its interface looking like Photoshop. Adobe had already completed a number of major improvements to Photoshop when they acquired Aldus in the mid 1990s.

Adobe discontinued PhotoStyler, kept the PageMaker application and spun Aldus Freehand off to Macromedia. I remember Macromedia selling programs like XRes to compete against Live Picture, but they were never able to develop a real "Photoshop-killer."

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 02-19-2010, 08:06 PM:

Photoshop GUI gallery