History of Adobe

• Founded in 1982 by two former Xerox employees, Charles Geschke and John Warnock, Adobe was an early pioneer in the software field. Adobe was located in Northern California in what is now known as Silicon Valley.
  
  The company's first venture was into desktop publishing with the development of PostScript, a programming language for printing and font applications. Soon after selling PostSricpt to Microsoft, Adobe, in conjunction with Apple, began work on its first graphic application, Illustrator. Originally designed for use on Macintosh systems, Illustrator is a vector-based drawing application that features pinpoint accuracy.
  
  

Development of Photoshop

• Thomas Knoll, a college student in Michigan, designed a graphics application that could be used on his computer in 1987. He named the program Photoshop and his brother John brought the program to California the following year, where he demonstrated it for executives from Adobe and Apple. Adobe bought the program and hired the brothers to continue working on it, developing add-ins and fine tuning the programming language.
  
  

Photoshop Versions

• The first version of Photoshop was only compatible with Apple's Macintosh computer line. Compared with later versions, the first Photoshop was rather limited in its abilities. Users could alter a photograph or graphic on the pixel level and use the edited image in media-based forums such as computers, television and film.
  
  In 1992, Adobe released a version that was compatible with computers running the Windows system. The following year, they released a version that could be used on IRIX and Solaris, operating systems used mainly by programmers.
  
  Adobe eventually released 10 versions of the program using the Photoshop name, ending with version 7.0.1, which was released in 2002. Subsequent versions of the program were renamed Photoshop CS and were bundled with other products in Adobe's Creative Suite.
  
  

Photoshop CS

• The first version of Photoshop CS was released in 2003 and came bundled with Bridge, Illustrator, InDesign and Version Cue; the premium edition also included Acrobat, Dreamweaver and GoLive. Photoshop CS2 was released in 2005 and CS3 came out in 2007. CS3 included the addition of three Macromedia programs, Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. CS4 was released in 2008 and contained several more media programs. All of the programs in the CS bundle are designed to be used as cross platforms. For example, a document created in Photoshop can be exported to Flash for animation and imported into a webpage using Dreamweaver.
  
  

Photoshop Elements

• Photoshop Elements is a budget version of Photoshop; it can perform many of the same functions as the original version but at a much lower cost. Elements was designed primarily for photograph editing, but it does not have all of the exportation functions found in the CS line of products. Photoshop Elements was first introduced in 2001 and the application is regularly upgraded with new features.