Adobe Photoshop’s 21st BirthDay : We Take a Look Back : History
Adobe’s Photoshop celebrates its 21st birthday this month, and with 12 major releases under its belt GeekTech decided to take a brief look back at the graphics editor that could–hilarious cat picture included!
Born In The 80′s
Photoshop, home of the PSD document format, started life back in the late eighties when PhD student Thomas Knoll was working on his thesis–a work detailing the processing of digital images. What started as a thesis soon evolved and in 1987 Thomas got to work on writing an image processing program for his Mac. His creation was created to work with grayscale images, and over a short period of time Thomas developed his program further, adding to it new digital editing processes. It didn’t take long before his brother John Knoll was intrigued by the program, dubbed Display.
John, who was working at George Lucas’ Industrial Sound & Magic, suggested to his brother that they turned Display into a more feature-rich fully-fledged image editing program. From here the two worked together, combining Thomas’ engineering background with his brothers design experience.
By 1988 the program had changed dramatically, with a whole host of new features and a name change to ImagePro. This name change was no mistake–the brothers decided to give the project another six months, complete a beta and attempt to sell it commercially with the help of the big guys in Silicon Valley.
One company decided to give the now Photoshop a go, but it wasn’t Adobe. A company called BarneyScan were the first to take to the brothers software, deciding to include around 200 licensed copies of the program with their scanners. However, it wasn’t long before Adobe did see the potential that Photoshop offered. In September of 1988 John gave a presentation to Adobe’s internal creative team, and the rest is history.
Come on, you knew this was coming! Oh yes, Apple’s pulling the curtain off its new MacBook Pro family, and compared to the last refresh cycle, there are a serious amount of updates. Just as we had heard, all three will be getting new Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 processors, AMD Radeon HD 6000M graphics (bye bye, NVIDIA!), FaceTime HD cameras, and some super fast Thunderbolt I/O transfer speeds. There are two new 13-inchers, two 15.4-inch versions, and one lone 17-inch model. How much will they cost you and what are the exact specs? You’ll want to hit the jump for all of that and the official press release. Apple MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt
Organic semiconductors have been teasing us with the possibility of computationally-inclined clothing for years, but until now we could only dream about our pants being the computer. That dream is closer to reality than ever, as researchers from IMEC have created a cheap (potentially 1/10th the cost of silicon chips), bendable microprocessor by layering a plastic substrate, gold circuits, organic dielectric, and a pentacene organic semiconductor to create an 8-bit logic circuit with 4000 transistors. Executing 6 instructions per second, these things won’t be challenging Watson any time soon, but the chips should prove useful in creating cheaper flexible displays and sensors to tell us whether that week-old chicken in the fridge has gone bad. The trick was to overcome individual organic transistors’ variable switching voltage thresholds — as opposed to silicon’s predictable nature — that eliminated the possibility of organic-based logic circuits previously. But by adding a second gate to each transistor, IMEC was able to control the electrical field in each to prevent unwanted switching and usher in the dawn of plastic processors. The zenith of nerd fashion can’t be far behind.
You don’t need us to tell you what you already know in your gut to be true: Redmond is working hard on its tablet strategy. How embarrassing is it for Microsoft, the company that pioneered tablets and the 7-inch UMPC, to be completely absent from the conversation in 2010 and 2011? That could change in September. Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley recently shared the slide above which she believes to be 99.99 percent genuine. The timeline shows the major milestone dates for a Windows 8 (aka, “Windows Next”) release — an OS that M. JoFo believes to be focused on tablets (aka, “Lap PCs” in Microsoft parlance) with its purpose-built touch-centric design. According to the slide, we’re looking at an M2 milestone this month followed by M3 in July or August. Foley says that would put Microsoft on track for a Windows 8 beta release right around Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) event in September followed by a second beta in 2012 before being released to manufacturing around the summer of 2012 — just like we heard early last year and just in time for Dell’s Hancock tablet. There are still many open questions including Microsoft’s ARM vs. Intel priorities and how the company plans to scale across the enterprise and the “workhorse PC” and “Family Hub PC” in the home. Hit the ZDNet link below for a deeper read or better yet, head on over to TechRepublic where Mary Jo Foley put together an excellent webcast outlining Microsoft’s tablet strategy in much more detail.
Just very last week Sony believed to facilitate persons found to bear hacked their PlayStation 3 consoles would bear their PlayStation Network access “terminated permanently.” Harsh terminology to facilitate, unsurprisingly, weren’t too eagerly established by the hacking district. Destructoid is nowadays exposure to facilitate not individual bear persons tinkerers found a way to unban themselves, but to facilitate they can in focus embargo some other console they famine. There’s apparently a catch, though, with the hackers having to know the unique ID assigned to the other console to facilitate they’ll be banning, which makes this sound like perhaps the hack is simply swapping a “good” ID on a “bad” console, but on this purpose we bear rejection details on the understood procedure at this juncture. Regardless, if about random girl with a cute avatar hits you up on IM and, in imitation of a only some minutes of casual conversation, asks you in lieu of the serialized run to on your PS3, think twice sooner than handing more than persons digits.
That the Atrix got itself rooted previous to it was even unfilled made us wonder solely how… Receptive it would be to the caresses of the hacker convergence by generous. Sadly we’re result it’s perhaps a morsel more frigid than its friendly disposition might be inflicted with principal us to believe. User adlx.Xda ended by the xda-developers forums has found with the intention of the phone’s logic records are not encrypted, but they are signed. This will get on to the process of replacing them and loading custom builds and the like very more complicated — but surely not impracticable.
