Eshark Design

Photoshop has no longer been a part of every designer’s life, now Photoshop has been everybody’s favorite, photographers, retoucher, web designers and maybe your grand children. Today, Photoshop turns twenty and here are some amazing back-to-the future stories I would like to share.

The story was all started when one college professor named Glenn Knoll maintained a darkroom in his house basement. Glenn’s darkroom has brought some huge influence to both his son Thomas Knoll and John Knoll where Thomas first learned image manipulation of how to make black-and-white and color prints conversion, while John was attracted to Glenn’s personal computer Apple II Plus (with 64k of RAM at that time) that he had brought home for his work research.

During the year 1988, the nature of technology that Glenn’s brought home had influence Thomas Knoll, at that time was a PhD student at the University of Michigan and currently is an American software engineer, teams up with his brother John and combines the routines of writing graphics program called Display on Macintosh Plus. In 1988, the program Display has been refined to becomes ImagePro and only in 1989, the program ImagePro has been finally renamed to Photoshop which turn the program into a full-fledged image editing program and so call the original “killer apps”

About a year later, in 1990, the first Photoshop version 1.0 ships in February. Only in the year 1994, Photoshop version 3.0 ships with the ‘Layers’ capability and following with ‘History’ palette functions in 1998 on Photoshop version 5.0. Since Photoshop was first run with Macitosh computer, it was only first run on PowerPC chip for Windows version in 1993.

Unbelievable isn’t it.. so, this question might be interesting, which first Photoshop are you?

Happy 20th Birthday Photoshop!

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