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Long live Photoshop - now 35 years!

Photoshop is now 35 years old! On February 19, 1990, the first version of the program was released. Here you can see what it looked like.

Calle Rosenqvist
CALLE@KAMERABILD.SE
Published

Hooray hooray hooray! Photoshop turns 35! It has been that long since version 1.0 of Adobe Photoshop was released, which is now used by a large majority of photographers.

To get really retro, in the clip above you can see what it looks like to use the program on a Macintosh Plus from 1986 with a black and white screen (1-bit), a processor at 8 MHz, and 4 MB of RAM. Not much processing power, no color, and spartan functionality.

The user interface of Photoshop 1.0, 1990.

Even before version 1.0 was officially released, the program was used to create the special effects in James Cameron's science fiction film The Abyss, and some beta versions circulated, from v.0.63 in 1988 to v0.87 in 1999, the latter being commercially available for Mac.

The world's first Photoshopped image. The picture was taken by the founder Thomas Knoll, who photographed his wife Jennifer. The image was used as a test photo to demonstrate the program's features.

Thomas Knoll is the programmer who laid the foundation for Photoshop in 1989. He created Photoshop in the programming language Pascal, and to some extent assembler. Thomas initially called the program “Display” but later changed it to Photoshop on the advice of his brother. Adobe then bought the license for the program and released it to the public.

At the release of version 1.0, the ambition was to sell 500 programs a month, but as we know, it became much more than that. Photoshop has now become so well-known that the word “photoshop” is constantly used when we talk about manipulating, changing, and improving an image. 

Photoshop's creator Thomas Knoll together with Kamera & Bild's editor-in-chief Calle Rosenqvist.

When Kamera Bild previously met Thomas Knoll, we took the opportunity to ask which version of Photoshop he thought was the best:

- Version 3.0 of course, when we chose to introduce layer management in the program. It has changed the workflow quite a bit for many who use the program.

If you're eager to try Photoshop 1.0, both the program and the source code can be downloaded for free here. The update of the more modern Photoshop, version 21.1.0, can be accessed through the Adobe CC app.

If you want to read more of our news about Photoshop, you can find it under our tag "Photoshop".

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