It's hard to believe that February was the 20th anniversary of Photoshop. Mac Life has a great article about the history of Photoshop and pictures of the packaging for every upgrade. I remember all but the very first version....

When it first arrived at Tarrant Co. College, I was a student and ran the lab at night. We had one copy of it in the faculty workroom for research purposes. It was a fascinating program even then, and as a collagist, I immediately saw its potential as the best pair of scissors and glue stick ever invented. The first project that I did with Photoshop, the images were larger than the floppy disk would hold (approx. 1.5 mg), so I was going to save to this giant tape disk drive called Syquest (60 mg) but it crashed and I wound up "saving" them by doing a screen shot on 50 ISO color film. So from my first digital body of work, I was merging digital and darkroom, and never really stopped.

I bought PS 3 for my home computer and remember reading art history while waiting for the lasso to finish selecting an area. When the marching ants were deselected the selection could no longer be moved, and there was only one undo. So when the Layers and History Palettes were added they were truly revolutionary advances in digital imaging.

Other memories of those early years.... my first scanner was a little hand-held vacuum sweeper looking thing that would do a 4x6 inch photo in one swipe. To scan images it had to be moved in a perfectly straight line by hand, and larger images had to be seamed together. My first digital camera had a goofy detachable lens that could be mounted on the wall to spy on people in the other room (1mg? image size). And I remember buying the first Zip Drive in the metroplex for 300 bucks - each disk held 100 mg ($20), I was so excited to have this little gadget, I drove out to get it the minute the store clerk called, when I got there it was still in the warehouse.

Much has changed in 20 years. What was once a curiosity, has quickly become the standard. Commercial photographers and photo-journalist shoot almost exclusively with digital cameras; and sadly, too many darkrooms are being ripped out and replaced with computer stations. The temptation to manipulate images is greater than ever, and without negatives to authentic an event, the veracity of photographic images is more questionable than ever before.  But the potential of the software to expand photographic possibilities is beyond my wildest dreams.

Three cheers to the Knoll brothers!