Adobe’s Photoshop, the all-conquering image manipulation software that now anchors the subscription-based Creative Suite, was originally written in Pascal and distributed under the name “Barneyscan XP” for its first licensor. Not long after…
The fate of Photoshop was sealed when Adobe, encouraged by its art director Russell Brown, decided to buy a license to distribute an enhanced version of Photoshop. The deal was finalized in April 1989, and version 1.0 started shipping early in 1990.
Over the next ten years, more than 3 million copies of Photoshop were sold. That first version of Photoshop was written primarily in Pascal for the Apple Macintosh, with some machine language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor where execution efficiency was important.
Here’s an ad for Barneyscan’s hardware, with the software lurking in the background, as described in this Quora thread.
Here’s more on the legend of Photoshop-as-Barneyscan from Stories of Apple:
Barneyscan XP, which was actually more lauded than the scanning hardware, was the first commercial incarnation (and distribution) of a program which would be rereleased eleven months later to much greater impact.
Encouraged by its art director Russell Brown, Adobe decided to buy a license to distribute an enhanced version of the software. In February 1990 it released the first version of Photoshop, the name originally chosen by Thomas Knoll.