February 19, 2008
Most Important Date in Digital Imaging History?
Source: Photoshopnews.com
Author: Jeff Schewe
In the grand scheme of human history, February 19th may not go down as a momentous occasion, but it’s recently come to light that at least in the world of digital imaging, today signifies a more important date than most anybody realized. And that folks, is the delicious irony.
I’ve been noted as somewhat of a historian when it comes to Photoshop lore. I wrote an article for the now defunct publication Photo Electric Imaging (PEI). Elmo Sapwater, the senior editor at the time, had known that at one point in time, I was going to do a Photoshop book (ironically still listed here by Amazon) and one chapter was going to be a History of Photoshop. Due to a lot of factors, the book was never produced, but I had gathered a lot of info (and portraits of a lot of engineers) so Elmo thought it would make for a great story for the Feb, 2000 issue-Photoshop’s 10th birthday.
The image above was the cover (click here to read the story behind making the cover image). The article is still available in PDF form from my website here.
Photoshop 1.0 box shot (by Jeff Schewe)
So, okay, I knew that Photoshop shipped in February of 1990. But recently, Kevin Connor of Adobe was asked by PC World magazine EXACTLY when Photoshop 1.0 “officially” shipped. Kevin didn’t know, so he sent out an email to Russell Brown (because Russell was actually at Adobe then) as well as Thomas Knoll (since he was the co-author) and myself (since I had written the “History”).
Neither Russell nor I knew…but Thomas sent this along in an email:
On 1/3/08 7:49 AM, “Thomas Knoll” wrote:
> I’m about 80% sure it was Feb 19, 1990.