…1981: The 8086 has not yet started its triumphant advance in the IBM PC, when Intel is already presenting its designated successor: On February 19, 1981, the manufacturer is launching the iAPX 432 on the market. The highly complex processor consists of well over 100,000 transistors and several chips that take on different tasks. Even before the 386, the iAPX 432 is Intel’s first 32-bit processor; It is technically far ahead of its time – and Intel has big plans for it: The 432 is to replace the outdated x86 family and become the dominant processor architecture of the 1980s. But things turned out quite differently: the iAPX turned out to be too slow and too expensive, the architecture turned into a failure. So Intel returns to the old x86 design, which will soon become the main computing platform thanks to IBM’s PC; with the 80386, the x86 series will soon be expanded to 32 bits, and its descendants will still dominate the market decades later. Successors to the failed 432, on the other hand, can only be found in the embedded area.
…1990: Photoshop may be Adobe’s best-known product today – but someone else developed it. In its original form, the program also had little in common with what defines Photoshop today: it could not edit images.
In the mid-1980s, the amateur photographer Thomas Knoll developed a program called Display in his spare time that allowed a Macintosh with its black-and-white monitor to display grayscale images using a dithering process – the graphics could not be edited, and the display didn’t even have a graphic one user interface and was controlled by keyboard commands. That was to change when Thomas’ brother John, who worked for the special effects company Industrial Light & Magic, saw the program: he was enthusiastic and encouraged Thomas to further develop Display into an image editing program. This is how Display became the Imagepro program.
Imagepro was not a great success at first. The Knoll brothers had difficulty finding a publisher for their work; finally they found what they were looking for at a scanner manufacturer who sold the software with their products. Only a few hundred copies were sold in this way, Imagepro remained only a marginal phenomenon on the software market. But that was soon to change: in September 1988, the Knolls presented their program at Adobe. Adobe had only recently established itself on the software market with the vector drawing program Illustrator – and was enthusiastic about what they saw. Adobe quickly acquired a license to distribute the software, which was finally released on February 19, 1990 as Adobe Photoshop 1.0 for Apple’s Macintosh. The rest of the story is probably known to every computer user: Photoshop soon became Adobe’s most important product, the once so simple program had become synonymous with digital image processing. Decades later, little has changed.
Happy birthday, Photoshop!
…2008: It wasn’t a particularly long war, the battle between the Hi-Res formats HD DVD and Blu-Ray Disc, both of which were preparing to take over the legacy of the DVD and at the same time better protect the consumer from any product piracy. Two camps formed, each favoring their own solution and splitting the entire entertainment industry. One of the biggest proponents of the HD DVD format was Toshiba, which among other things also brought the first HD DVD players onto the market and supplied the Xbox 360 add-on drive for high-resolution content. After the HD-DVD front had been crumbling for some time, the February 19 announcement was the death knell for the camp. Toshiba announced in a press release that it was giving up the HD DVD business. After that, it was only a matter of time before the HD-DVD Promotion Group disbanded.
Further information
• Photoshop as a free app for the iPhone
• The Birth of MS Word (PCGH Retro)
