I was using a Scitex imaging workstation before Photoshop 1.0 was released. There were others available too, like Barco and Paintbox.
The big advantage of Photoshop is that it could run on cheap hardware (Mac IIcx and IIfx) with decent performance.
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> I was using a Scitex imaging workstation before Photoshop 1.0
Oh wow. That takes me back... It's probably been 18 years or so since I've heard that term.
I reckon I'll be wondering around in nostalgia for the rest of the day now. Remembering the good ol' days of my IIci with it's Radius Rocket.
If anyone knows where I can find resources about the history of such machines, such as early reviews, screenshots or manuals – either of academic research prototypes or of commercial products – I’d really appreciate it.
I intend to sometime in the not-impossibly-distant future write detailed descriptions (beyond the level of any of the PS books or online resources I’ve seen) of all the tools in Photoshop, and some critiques/suggestions for improvement. A lot of the ideas seem traceable to 70s/80s research at PARC, NYIT, Stanford, etc., or to these early workstations like those made by Scitex, Tektronix, etc., but there’s not much material online about all of that history, so my knowledge of it is pretty sketchy.
[My email is in my profile, for anyone who has advice.]
One very early system was the Symbolics S-Graphics suite, which came out sometime in 1984. Its main strength was 3d graphics (actually either it or Wavefront was the first commercially sold 3d graphics system), but the Lisp Machine versions also came with 2d paint. When Symbolics went out of business the code was acquired by a Japanese company (Nichimen) and ported to Allegro Common Lisp on Irix and Windows NT (and later Linux) and sold branded as "Mirai" as a 3d graphics application (although the 2d paint part was still there in the form of an integrated texture painting tool).
Here's some scans of an early S-Graphics sales brochure: http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/000256.html
Unfortunately the company basically folded sometime in 2003-2004ish timeframe - the last work done on Mirai as far as I know was on contract for Weta for Lord of the Rings (Mirai was used to animate Gollum's face; there's an interesting article about it on AWN: http://www.awn.com/articles/technology/two-towers-face-face-...). You can still buy a copy, but it's not under active development: http://www.izware.com/mirai/ (the texture painting tool is pretty cool: http://www.izware.com/mirai/paint.htm). When I have a spare million I'd like to buy the rights and release it as Free Software.
You could try to look for information on this guy: http://www.worth1000.com/artists/deralt
He started doing photo retouching in the 1950s. After he retired he went on to make some of the best photoshops I've ever seen. He was then in his 70s if I remember correctly. He made some posts about how they did it back then, so if there's a way to search deeply in worth1000s forum history it will be there. These posts were made in 2004-2005 I'd think.