Photoshop, the graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems, was released. The project began when Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee. The brothers then renamed the program ImagePro. But since the name was already taken, Thomas later named it Photoshop.
The brothers made a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner.
During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown from Adobe. The demonstration was a success and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute.
After further development, Photoshop 1.0 was released on February 19, 1990 exclusively for Macintosh. The Barneyscan version included advanced color editing features that were stripped from the first Adobe shipped version. And with each and every version of Photoshop, the handling of color slowly improved. Photoshop that is written in C++ (formerly Pascal), quickly became the industry standard in digital color editing.
Adobe Photoshop is the companion product of Adobe Illustrator.