In celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of its’ release, here’s a few images from the very first version of Photoshop. Developed by Thomas and John Knoll in 1987-88 and initially known as ‘Display’, the program was successfully pitched to Adobe in 1988 who purchased the licence to distribute it. Photoshop 1.0 emerged in February 1990 and was only available on the Mac. The first Windows-compatible version came two years later.
The very first commercial release contained the program disc, a tutorial disc, a program disc containing software from third-party developers and the user guide and calibration software.
The main Photoshop disc was deliberately constrained to 745kb, so that it could fit on a single 800kb floppy disc.
The first picture processed in Photoshop was entitled ‘Jennifer in paradise’, and it featured John Knoll’s girlfriend (then wife) Jennifer. This was used in testing and in early demonstrations.
I know what you’re asking… So when did Adobe engineer extraordinaire Seetharaman Narayanan join the party? Well, that was a year later in 1991 :-)