Fabulous to think that Photoshop once came on a floppy disk
Wow. Photoshop is 20 years old today. There will shortly be a generation of young designers around who won’t have lived in the ‘pre-Photoshop’ world. Actually, that doesn’t really matter practically. It’s more a landmark thing, like I pride myself on having been born pre-Moonshot. I would have been about a year-and-a-half old when Neil Armstrong took his first step on the lunar surface, so it would have meant extraordinarily little to me. But still …
And so Photoshop is a 20-year-old piece of software. It is part of the language and the landscape, visually and lexicographically. Fascinating!
I had prepared this spiel about Star Wars and Industrial Light and Magic, as Thomas Knoll and his brother John, who essentially invented Photoshop, worked there in the late 1980s. It gave me a great chance to wax on about childhood. It went a little bit like this:
– Now, I remember everything about Star Wars. Well, not everything. What I remember was that I lived in Jamaica when it came out, and we’d heard about this fantastic new movie that was coming out of America, called Star Wars, and my friends and I could hardly wait to see it. I distinctly remember the TV ads featuring Luke rescuing Leia by swinging across – was it a massive garbage disposal chute?
My mother had been on a training course to Chicago, too, and I remember her bringing back a Star Wars book, with loads of stills from the movie. I got the skinny on just who the Tusken Raiders were, and the significance of Grand Moff Tarkin. Man, it was exciting!
There was always this thought: how did they do it? How did they get the light sabres to illuminate, to get light to just rise up out of a handle and stop at some prescribed distance above? How did they get Luke’s landspeeder to hover? Luke’s landspeeder has always been totally fascinating to me just because – and the Millennium Falcon is in this too – they’re at once so futuristic and so tatty! They’re jalopies! They’re the Ryannair fleet to the Wright Brothers. Fascinating!–
Then I realised I was going too far off topic, being too tangential. Me tangential?
Sean Parent, photo by Julian Dodd
Haha! So, rather than all that rabbit about computers and effects and optics, I decided to post up an interview I conducted in 2002 for Cre@teOnline magazine with one of the Adobe senior computer scientists, named Sean Parent, who had been working hard on the Actions palette and coding Photoshop 6 from scratch. He talked about the development process, how the team worked, how Photoshop software guru Mark Hamburg developed ideas by watching photographer Jeff Schewe work and what Adobe had learned businesswise from Xerox PARC.
I enjoyed one of his quotes in particular: “The Photoshop team is a paranoid team.
If you come along and you say: ‘This is a Photoshop killer’, suddenly now, you’re a target. The team is very quick to respond.”
I do realise it’s a bit on-message, but I liked it all the same. And there’s also: “You can only present the user with so much complexity and Photoshop has been at the limit since Photoshop 3, I think, in terms of how much complexity you can put in the user’s face.”
Happy birthday, you faithful old dog.