Photoshop is 22 years old. The fact that Photoshop has been around so long is pretty amazing considering that personal computers only began becoming available around 30 years ago. In the early years of personal computers (yes I did have a Timex Sinclair 1000 so I am a true geek), there was no such thing as a program like Photoshop that you could purchase and easily install onto your computer. Users would have to write their own programs in order to do anything useful with a computer - and that's exactly how Photoshop came into existence.
Photoshop started out as an image display program and evolved over the years into a highly successful and wildly popular image editing program used worldwide. Photoshop came into existence rather modestly, as a research tool for a student named Thomas Knoll. In 1987, Thomas was a PhD student at the University of Michigan. He had purchased an Apple Macintosh Plus computer to help him process digital images for his PhD. However, the Mac computer was not able to display the images the way Thomas wanted to. In order to correct this problem, Thomas wrote a subroutine that he named Display to help the computer correctly display the grey-scale levels in his images.
Thomas' brother John, an employee of Industrial Light & Magic, took an interest in the program and told Thomas to develop Display into a true image editing program that people could use to manipulate images. Before the advent of this program, the only way to manipulate images was in the darkroom. Thomas took off a couple of months from his PhD program, and he and John collaborated together in 1988 to create an early version of Photoshop called ImagePro. A few months later Thomas renamed the program Photoshop and arranged for a manufacturer to help distribute his program. He originally was able to sell around 200 copies of the software.
A computer software company named Adobe took an interest in Photoshop in September 1988 and arranged a licensing agreement. It took 10 months to then develop Photoshop 1.0, which was shipped out in February 1990 (I remember using this version myself in 1991 - it came with scanner that our office had purchased). Photoshop 1.0 was originally designed exclusively for Macintosh computers, but today can be used on Windows as well. As the software became ever-increasingly popular and profitable, several updates were released. Today, Photoshop is on its eleventh release and is more popular than ever.
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