Thomas_Knoll

Well, it was a tool that had sort of immense versatility. And even from the very early days, people were doing things that I never imagined would even be possible. So it's sort of like asking a manufacturer of ink and paper "Can you imagine all the things people would write, or draw?"

Uh...we've thought about this, many times, and the issue here is that most people who use Linux are not actually used to paying for software.

Especially nowadays, with the Photoshop photography program where you can subscribe for $10 a month to both Photoshop and Lightroom, you are being very cheap if you pirate it.

Well, it sort of happened because of procrastination.

I was working on my PhD, and I got to the point of having to write my thesis, and I really hated doing that, so I wrote Photoshop instead.

It was my brother's idea to try and sell it. So he asked if he could try and shop it around to various companies. So he traveled around doing demos, and the first "bundle deal" that we did with Photoshop was with a scanner company called BarneyScan. And they bundled a beta version of Photoshop under the name "BarneyScan XP." And for a while, that was the only way to purchase Photoshop, so some people purchased the scanner just to get Photoshop. This was in 1988, the bundle happened. I started writing Photoshop in 1987, and it had gotten to be that state by 1988.

And we had always intended to find a publisher to publish it as a stand-alone piece of software, and my brother was doing demos all during this time, and the BarneyScan deal was noncompetitive, we still had the rights to sell it to a publisher, so we found Adobe and reached a handshake agreement in 1988. The final paperwork was signed in 1989.

And they actually shipped it in 1990.

And at that point, BarneyScan had to bundle the real Photoshop, rather than the beta version they had, under the name Photoshop.

We don't have perfect records going back to this time, because we didn't realize how important this was going to be, but our best estimate for the shipping date for Photoshop 1.0 was February 19, 1990.

So today is the exact 25th anniversary, from what we can tell.

Well, when I was first writing Photoshop, it was intended as a tool for graphic artists and advertising photographers and press photographers. And a lot of what they did was advertising photography, which is by its nature deceptive. So that was certainly an expected use. It was also used by news organizations, which ideally should NOT be deceptive. Like any tool - a tool can be abused, or used properly. So it's all about the ethics of the user, rather than the goodness or badness of the tool itself.