In 1987, Thomas Knoll, a PhD student
at the University of Michigan began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome
display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic
employee, who recommended that Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six-month break
from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program. Thomas renamed the program ImagePro, but the
name was already taken. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with
scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of
Photoshop were shipped" this way.During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the
program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe
decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. While John worked on plug-ins in California,
Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing code. Photoshop 1.0 was released on February 19, 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.
The Barneyscan version included advanced color editing features that were stripped from the first Adobe shipped version.
The handling of color slowly improved with each release from Adobe and Photoshop quickly became the industry standard in
digital color editing. At the time Photoshop 1.0 was released, digital retouching on dedicated high end systems, such as
the SciTex, cost around $300 an hour for basic photo retouching.
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