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.
Stuff Sneak 
You must be logged in to post a comment.