Life before Photoshop
As Photoshop reached it’s 20th birthday, it reminded me of my old Scitex days.
For those of you that don’t know about Scitex it was a company that produced hardware and software for hi-end graphics for the print industry.
I think they actually started out in the textile market. Anyways, these were the first minicomputers that did what Photoshop does today. I don’t know why they were called minicomputers, they were huge workstations that had remote CPUs that had to be in temperature controlled rooms. We used these for Clone/airbrush, Masking, Color Correction, and Assembly. Air brushing on these Scitex machines was more of an art, compared to PhotoShop these days. In fact, on one of the first machines I worked on, called a CIPC or Pixette workstation, the airbrushing had to be done twice! Once on the CMY channels, then on the Black channel. Some processes were interactive, like color correction and airbrushing, while most were done using terminal commands. Trapping (LW, FR then type specs), Placing (CT, P filename) and Res & Dim to size CTs. Some of these systems ranged from $300K to $1.5M!
As years went by, the workstations improved, Response 300 (maybe because it cost over $300K) or Imagers as they were called, had large trackball (size of a baseball) and large wheel for zooming in. I still miss this method for moving around in a file. Then they introduced the Blaze (CT only) or PrisMax (that did both CT & LW). See photo from Graphic Art Monthly Article from 1990 (me pictured in the back).
http://dinofiocchi.com/post/429247954/photo-from-graphic-arts-monthly-magazine-sept
These workstations ranged in the $200K+, no wonder Photoshop eventually replaced these machines.
more Scitex info:
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Scitex-Corporation-Ltd-Company-History.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scitex_Corporation_Ltd.
