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Happy b-day, P’shop!

Adobe Photoshop turns twenty today. And, oh, what fun we have had!

Actually, the image editing system I learned on predated Photoshop by several years. Several years was a millenimum in early computing days; desktop computers couldn’t do shit in 1987. They certainly couldn’t do shit graphically. But my machine was stuffed full of a hundred grand worth of special bits and it could do shit. The image editing software it ran gave P’shop a run for its money for years.

An important part of my job in those days was a sort of vaudeville routine where I demo’ed that big boy for clients in real-time. So they’d know what a righteous, bad-ass research and engineering firm we were.

Can you remember a time when people said things like, “photos don’t lie” (and really believed it) and Leisure Suit Larry was a cutting edge computer game? Well, that’s when I was taking snapshots with a video frame grabber, lassoing bits and moving them around before a customer’s very eyes.

You shoulda seen their faces! (Particularly after I erased their noses and replaced them with supplemental eyes). Many thought it was some kind of trick we were playing with video. Computers couldn’t do things like that!

Anyhow, I know I’ve told all my war stories before (blogger’s privilege, telling them again). Happy birthday, P’shop — and here’s to the next amazing technology nobody ever saw coming.

February 19, 2010 — 6:55 pm
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