John Knoll

Hi, my name is John Knoll and I'm a visual effects supervisor here at Industrial Light and Magic.

And you're the guy who wrote, or.

One of the guys who wrote Photography. Co developer of Photoshop. Yes, yeah.

And so you said there's a 20th anniversary coming up?

Yeah, well, as we speak, it's mid January 2010. Next month is the 20th anniversary of the release of Photoshop 1.0. Adobe's putting together a little celebration of that anniversary, and I've been asked to do a demonstration of her version of Photoshop. I still have, for reasons I'm not completely clear myself, I still have fairly old Macintosh that I've been keeping in storage. It's a power Macintosh 8500, and I pulled it out because it's got OS 9 on it, so it can still run the very old binaries.

When Photoshop came out, it was OS 6.5, wasn't it?

Or 6. Yeah, 6.7. 7 may have started shipping.

The 7 came out in 1991.

Right. Okay. Well, then, yeah, it was prior to OS 7.

That's how I got my name, Scobologer, by the way, because I loaded the beta of OS 7 on everybody's machines at San Jose State University, and one of the people who worked there said, I've been scovalized. I can't use my computer anymore. That's why I remember that year.

So I had done a reasonably good job of kind of keeping a historical arc. I pulled out one of my old backup disks and I have versions of Photoshop going all the way back to the original display program I booted up. Display. Display actually will run sort of. You can boot it up, you can bring up the about box, you can see what's in the menus. Unfortunately, I think the API to the memory Manager changed because any time there's an attempt to allocate memory, it just gives out of memory error. So you can't actually do anything. You can't actually display an image with it, which is too bad. But at least I can still boot it up. And I have some older versions. I think that the demo I'm going to do at Adobe next week is actually going to be 0.93.

Wow.

I think it's close to the version that I originally demoed at Adobe to start the negotiations for them publishing it.

How much RAM is on this machine?

The one that I'll do the demo on?

Yeah.

Oh, it's not that. I think it dates back from 1995, so I don't know, it probably has 16 megs of RAM in it, not gigs.

And Photoshop ran in the original Photoshop. How much RAM did that need when it came out in 90?

As much as you could give. It had a virtual memory system for paging the images off a disk.

But I remember Steve Wozniak showed me off his new ram Drive back then 91. He bought a 400 meg ram drive, cost 40 grams. He bought it just to run Photoshop. He had a $40,000 dye sublimation color printer, one of the first in Silicon Valley. And now a $70 printer does a better job. It's crazy.

Yeah. The first hard drive I ever owned I got from my Macintosh plus, and it was Super Mac XP 2020 megabyte drive. It was $750. Sounded like a jet engine about to take off.

Yeah. So what are you doing here now at.

Working on a technical test for an upcoming maybe movie. And depending on the success of the test, the movie will either get a green light or not. They want to demonstrate that it's possible. And beyond that, I'm not really at liberty to comment on it. Very cool. We decided, well, if we can't be first, we absolutely have to be best. And so we redoubled our efforts to make sure that all the algorithms that are in there, the resizing, the rotating, all those were as fast as they could possibly be and as high quality as they could be. So that if somebody compared our product with somebody else, ours would always come out ahead. And I think one thing that helped is that I used these tools even today. Even on some. Even today, Yeah. I mean, now everybody uses it. But at the time I had started tinkering around with computer graphics and I was starting to do a little work over in our computer graphics department. And so I started actually using this tool in production. And when you're a user, when you're really using it to try and make imagery, that you develop a different focus about what's important in the application. And I was constantly pushing on workflow things and additional features, improving the interface. And I think that shows in the product. I think it was a better product because one of the developers is an artist and uses it well.

I remember when I was walking through ILM once back in your pre Photoshop and you hand me a data sheet and you asked me if I knew any software developers. How important was it that you hooked up with Adobe? Did you try see if Apple was interested?

Yeah, actually, probably I turned them down.

Photo editing is a fad.

Right.

When I Started at ilm, I was a contract employee. I was not actually on staff. So those of us who are job to job, hopefully it works out that one show ends and another one ramps up and you sort of transition from one show to the next. And that generally was true. But every once in a while a show would end and then there would be two months before the next one would start. And I'm sorry, but you're on your own. And you know, I worked in the freelance world prior to that, so I was used to that situation. It's a little harder in San Francisco than it is in la, because in LA there's so much production going on that it's very easy to jump around. But I got to know some of the commercial production world up here and I got hooked up with a director named Trip Groover who did a lot of television commercials that had a high concentration of visual effects in them. And I had some of my own motion control equipment. And I got hooked up with this guy and we did a bunch of commercials together. And he called me up at one point because he got some deal to produce some video for Apple for. I think it was Jean Louis Gasset's like some big elaborate birthday party that was going on. And so I got involved in that. And so we had a bunch of meetings at Apple down there about it. And I got to know some people at Apple. And then when we started working on Photoshop, I called up a couple of friends at Apple for advice and Jim Batson was one of them, Dave Fung was another. I'm probably forgetting a few, but there were some really nice, very helpful guys at Apple that had good advice and they said, you know, I think you guys should talk to Super Mac. Because at the time Supermac was developing Pixel Paint. And when I first talked to Apple about it, we weren't quite sure what Photoshop was going to be. In fact, it wasn't even called Photoshop at that point. It was still called Display. And it could read and write a whole bunch of different image file formats. And so the initial pitch to supermac was to bundle it as a file translation utility with Pixel Paint. And so we went and met with them and I gave them a demo of, of what it could do and they seemed interested and they did some back of the envelope calculations. Well, we figured we're going to be shipping about this many units Pixel Paint per month, and if we give you this royalty per copy, oh man, that's real money. That's actually worth doing. And since we had had this genuine interest, and it looked like it was financially worthwhile. I called up Tom and said, oh, we got to do this.