{"id":12574,"date":"2007-12-03T01:17:48","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T01:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2007\/12\/adobe-the-second-quarter-century-begins.html"},"modified":"2007-12-03T01:17:48","modified_gmt":"2007-12-03T01:17:48","slug":"adobe_the_second_quarter_century_begins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/03\/adobe_the_second_quarter_century_begins\/","title":{"rendered":"Adobe: The second quarter-century begins"},"content":{"rendered":"

On December 2, 1982, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke started Adobe Systems<\/a>.  Today the once-tiny maker of printer software begins the next quarter-century of its existence. <\/p>\n

In 1993, my freshman year in college, I attended a meeting of the Notre Dame MadMacs user group.  I can’t tell you a single other thing about that evening, but I remember that they played a video (on a computer! my God!!) from a company I’d never heard of.  On screen an animation depicted a hand opening up to reveal (as I remember) an eye on its palm.  “Imagine what you can create,” read an arcing line of text above the hand.  And below, “Create what you can imagine.  Adobe.” <\/p>\n

And then I realized…like I was shot…Like I was shot with a diamond…a diamond bullet right through my forehead…<\/em>  Okay, perhaps that’s a bit much<\/a>–but I thought, “I don’t know who these guys are, but I’ve got to find out.”  Photoshop was shortly to make one hell of an impression on me, and all these years later, I can’t believe–still cannot believe–that I work here.  (Some part of me still suspects that my car drifted off the road after they cancelled LiveMotion, and that all of this is playing out in ultra slow-mo, Owl Creek Bridge<\/a><\/em>-style.) <\/p>\n

If you’re interested in the history of Adobe, check out Pamela Pfiffner’s excellent Inside the Publishing Revolution<\/a><\/em>, released to coincide with the company’s 20th anniversary.  Excerpts & some fun photos<\/a> (David Hockney meeting Photoshop; young Steve Jobs) are on Adobe.com.  I’d love to see an updated edition, one that includes the history of Macromedia<\/a> (and the various companies that formed it) and more.<\/p>\n

As for the future, one goal comes to my mind over and over: radically improving the user experience<\/u> by radically democratizing how Photoshop* is developed, and by whom<\/u>.  Instead of measuring the Photoshop team in the dozens, let’s measure it in the thousands–or the hundreds of thousands.  Let’s leverage the ol’ series of tubes, helping anyone with a good idea share it<\/a>, opening the application skin to far more developers<\/a>, even upending what a document can be<\/a>.  Photoshop belongs to a whole lot more than one company or group of developers; it belongs to a global community of the visually expressive.  It’s this team’s job to keep anything from blocking the light<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here’s to the future,
\nJ.\n<\/p>\n

* I’d speak on behalf of other apps, but it’s already presumptuous enough for me to speak on behalf of Photoshop. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On December 2, 1982, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke started Adobe Systems.  Today the once-tiny maker of printer software begins the next quarter-century of its existence. In 1993, my freshman year in college, I attended a meeting of the Notre Dame MadMacs user group.  I can’t tell you a single other thing about that evening, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12574"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}