2026-11-01
100 Products That Changed the World #37 | Adobe Photoshop (1990): How a PhD Student's Basement Code Introduced Layers and Ruled Visual Culture for 36 Years
[100 Products That Changed the World · #37] Very few software products in history have become so dominant that their brand name entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a transitive verb. Google defined search; Adobe Photoshop defined image manipulation. Born in a Michigan basement in 1987, Photoshop democratized capabilities that previously required a $300,000 Scitex workstation and ended the century-old chemical darkroom era. Here is how Layers, Plug-ins, and Creative Cloud built a 36-year monopoly.
