They renamed it “Photoshop” and began to search for a company to distribute it. In the summer of 1988 they realized that it indeed could be a credible commercial product. Gradually the program, called “Display”, became more sophisticated.
Thomas said, “We developed it originally for our own personal use…it was a lot a fun to do.”
His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, found it useful for editing photos, but it wasn’t intended to be a product. Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan, had written a program in 1987 to display and modify digital images.
