As a student, he set out to fix a problem with his Mac and ended up creating Adobe Photoshop by accident

Adobe Photoshop is one of the world’s most famous and popular image-editing software programs, practically since its inception in the late 1980s. Indeed, the name Photoshop has become part of computer culture alongside other widely recognized names such as Windows, Mac, Office, and many others. However, the history of Photoshop is quite intriguing, having essentially emerged from the curiosity of two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll, back in 1987, when the former, as an engineering student at the University of Michigan, began developing his own image editing program in response to a need caused by a specific limitation of the Macs of that era.

This is how Photoshop was born: thanks to a Macintosh

The thing is, Thomas Knoll had a problem with his Macintosh Plus: the computer didn’t display grayscale properly on the screen, which prompted the engineering student to fix it using his own knowledge. However, once he started working on that simple bug, Thomas couldn’t stop, turning his small fix into a program that, years later, would become a key tool in computer-based photo and image editing.

So Thomas Knoll developed his own tool called Display, a program that did exactly what its name suggested: it manipulated the pixels on his Mac Plus to simulate shades of gray. However, once he had achieved this, he didn’t want to take it any further until his brother John Knoll—who at the time was working in the special effects department at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic (the same company responsible for the visual effects in ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’)—took notice of Thomas’s idea, which had enormous potential.

That was when they set to work on that almost prehistoric Display to turn it into a standalone, functional image-editing program, thus creating a much more complex and advanced tool they called ImagePro, which would soon be renamed Photoshop. It wasn’t until October 1988 that they released the first alpha version, Photoshop 0.63, which never made it to market.

That was when Adobe entered the picture, showing great interest in that early version of Photoshop and purchasing the software with a view to a commercial launch. In early 1990, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was finally released exclusively for the Mac. That first version of the famous software ran only on Mac System 6.0.3, weighed in at 2 megabytes—quite a lot for the time—and carried a truly steep price tag of $895. After all, it was a professional tool, particularly suited for design and advertising agencies, graphic designers, and media newsrooms.

However, Photoshop quickly became a benchmark in image editing, particularly thanks to its tools and truly intuitive interface; so much so that the Lasso and Magic Wand tools—which remain basic features copied by numerous similar programs to this day—were key to its widespread adoption. What once required hours and hours of manual labor could now be done in a matter of minutes without the need for extensive expertise in the field.

And that has remained the case to this day, with Adobe releasing new editions and updated versions of Photoshop, a program that continues to lead the field despite the numerous competitors that have emerged over the years, including free alternatives. Such is Photoshop’s penetration into popular culture that Adobe even donated the source code for Photoshop 1.0 to the Computer History Museum, making it part of the history of computing and of humanity itself.

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