Slashdot Mirror
Soviet Image Editing Tool From 1987
nacturation writes "Three years before Photoshop 1.0 was released, computer engineers in the USSR were already retouching photographs using some surprisingly advanced technology. A video shows how the Soviets went about restoring damaged images with the help of rotary scanners, magnetic tape, and trackballs. No word on whether this technology was used to fake moon landings or put missiles in Cuba." Photo manipulation in the USSR (and elsewhere) had a pretty good jump on computers, though.
I'm pretty sure I was cutting and pasting and cropping and rotating images on uVAXen a couple of years before this.
And I'm not even joking. Aren't autocratic regimes the obvious clients for such techniques?
But they were doing this stuff with deluxe paint on an Amiga in 1985.
Its nice to see that someone besides the super geek was using image editing back then!
~Bchickens
...Photo's edit you!!!
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Now the rest of you can concentrate on real, intelligent responses. Don't say I never took one for the team.
Earlier in the late 70s and early 80s, people around the globe used Crossfield and Hell drum scanners to retouch photos. Yeahs before computers were able to do it.
I had pieces of a Hell drum scanner in my office in 1988 when I was building an image correction software to control it. By then, ImagePro had already been doing this for a couple of years, on computers.
And they used it for "restoring damaged images". Yeah. Sure.
Images that were "damaged," for example, by having Trotsky in them.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
All this is is just the very basics of restoration tech. No conspiracy. Not even news.
"Put Missiles in Cuba"?
Now that would be an impressive image editing software package.
I'd buy it.
The world's biggest killer, dihydrogen monoxide, is known in ultra-secret circles as a key ingredient in doctoring images.
Home of The Suki Series
...rotary scanners, magnetic tape, and trackballs Photoshop you!
Wait a minute, at 1:11 is that Kip from Napoleon Dynamite???
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
... video shopped. Are you sure it is real?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There were grayscale image editing programs for Macintosh at that time, and color image editing software for mini computers even earlier.
-- Boycott Shell
Yeah, well, I'll bet they didn't have an Uncrop function!
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
OK, so the Soviets could by western hardware (Pericolor drum scanner and an Apple ///). Big deal.
Too late !! They already fucked themselves out of existence !! In former-Soviet Red Commie Russia, they now have a full-fledge Putinocrocy !! Just goes to show if you squeeze a potato hard enough, you can get vodka !!
The real story is that the Soviets had clip art collections that made their job easier. This was years before clip-art was widely used in the West.
People doctoring photos could choose from the "Still Popular Heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution" as well as "Accepted Images of our Beloved Leaders: Lenin through Gorbachev".
What was little known at the time is that if you bought both sets, you would also get a free set "Communist Leaders of the world". This set had flattering pictures of Chaiman Mao, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera.
It's not Soviet , it's French ! It's a PERICOLOR-1000 system with a software translated to Russian. They used to buy hardware and software in the West and change it a bit(translate) and present it as one developed internally in some scientific institute. Here is the discussion in Russian: http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/history/107465/
... must mock sovjet russia...
Granted, the equipment depicted looks to be a combo of imported (drum scanner), cloned (Apple II), Soviet (tape drive), and in-house (track ball) equipment.
However, I'm going to make a wild-ass guess that the Cyrillic interface photo-editing software was home grown, and that's the significant value-add to the system.
Luke, help me take this mask off
There were image manipulation before Photoshop?
LIES!
That the verb for doing image manipulation is 'to photoshop' should be proof enough! I mean OMGz LOL If teh wordz is to photoshop, how could you photoshop, before photoshop 1.0? with the beta release???!!!111oenenoene
Seriously, kids, the shift of the millenium was not celebrated as the end of the stone age!
Unless the soviets helped the US fake the landing, I doubt that this software was used to fake one.
Sig: I stole this sig.
You must think in Russian to use this software.
SGI and the X Windows system both existed in 1987.
And the editing tools included 3D modeling.
This is not state of the art in the day.
Although I can see how important Censorship of images in the Soviet Union would be in the day... Its all about the propaganda.
Long live our Soviet motherland,
Built by the people's mighty hand.
Long live our people, united and free.
Strong in our friendship tried by fire.
Long may our crimson flag inspire,
Shining in glory for all men to see.
And yet there are no images in the article, just video. Is it just me who's annoyed at the growing number of stories with just a couple of sentences and a video? I just skip those. Oh well.
Photoshop didnt invented photo retouching as most in the western world seem to believe.
One of the Russian comments points out that the software is in fact French PERICOLOR-1000 translated to Russian.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
You'd be written in and out of the "history" books.
Zinoviev died, and was written out.
Trotski was murdered in Mexico, and was written out.
Hundreds and thousands were written out of existence, their tombstones chiseled clean.
That was one of the points in 1984.
Control the books and you control the history of a people. Winston Smith job was working as a "redactor", part of the problem, even as he sought, and failed, to find a solution.
People who could recite the history of the lottery numbers chosen at what date could be counted on not to remember that a partner one day was an enemy the next, basically Stalin's form of control, a paranoid/schizophrenic view of humanity where the "others" are all pawns to be played and discarded.(Saddam Hussein was a Stalinist in more ways that one.)
The Gulags were filled with them, and ultimately the cemeteries were filled with imaginary adversaries, by the venial the opportunistic; the survivors who felt less shame at their survival than they felt for their victims.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I don't care for the year but this just looks so much cooler than photoshop, I just love that scanline distortion happening during frame drawing :)
I am a sucker for these kind of devices, just like the modeller that was used in making of the star wars 3d wireframe deathstar model.
Soviet hardware design style rules, everything looks like from a sci-fi movie.
Of many, many patents.
We'll see you in court, USSR!
Quantel Paintbox beats them both, it was first launched in 1981!
Quantel sued two companies, one of them being Adobe but didn't win the Adobe case, largely due to the existance of Superpaint, who's author testified in the case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpaint
You'd be written in and out of the "history" books.
Zinoviev died, and was written out.
Trotski was murdered in Mexico, and was written out.
Hundreds and thousands were written out of existence, their tombstones chiseled clean.
[citation needed]
The family of Greedo was relieved to hear about this old technology especially about claims that the Soviet Union may have used this technology to frame their patriarch. When asked a spokesthing for the family remarked "For years we have said that George Lucas with the help of foreign powers altered footage to make it look like Greedo shot first. We've always believed that no good [beep] [beep] scoundrel Han Solo shot our Greedo in cold blood." The spokesthing continued "Well, in a way it's a good thing it has taken this long, because now that Han is married to Leia, we're talking about Intergalactic Princess money now." When asked if that meant the family intended to pursue a wrongful death lawsuit against Han Solo, the spokesthing only responded "CHA-CHING!"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I've often thought how much more Winston Smith could have got done (in his day job) in an on-line world. Maybe he would have been more content, and they could have saved making him rebel so he could be tortured for a later date.
http://www.amazon.com/Commissar-Vanishes-Falsification-Photographs-Stalins/dp/B00007D037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1288900689&sr=8-1
The methods used by the Soviets to manipulate and control the information consumed by the populace is pretty widely understood, and I'm sure that need to maintain control drove the use of this relatively sophisticated photo manipulation software.
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Can't think of of a better citation than this. Or search for the NKVD. Their specialty was airbrushing history. Oh, and shooting political enemies of the state in the head.
Authoritarian tyrants are much the same whether their guise is communism, national socialism, or democracy. The best way to make people forget about enemies of the state is to not talk about them.
TO THE CLOUD!
And there it is.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
A special report for the tinfoil-hat brigade;
Man Actually Did Land on the Moon
The Soviets Actually Did Ship Nuclear-Tipped Ballistic Missles to Cuba
We now return you to your regularly scheduled dementia.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to rent the same studio that NASA used?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
While the image repainting was slow simply due to memory bandwidths back then, one can't but be amazed at the instantaneous response from the right-hand menu system. It seems like it took one or two vsyncs for the new menu to appear in response to a keystroke. This is something that you still can't get on modern OSes simply because there's always the VM subsystem in the way. On OS X, working normally with few running applications and plenty of memory, I can get 100+ms lag when switching between menus. Sure, the median may be pretty good, but the worst case is annoying. It interferes with the workflow. Never mind the everpresent lag on the workspace of most applications, be it photo editing, spreadsheet, CAD, etc.
I think that VM paging-induced lags are something that can't be overcome as long as we keep programming like we do -- with the assumption of infinite memory, more or less. I would really like to see a gradual shift towards realtime scheduling and applications where at least the core code and data is permanently wired. In the days of CP/M, WordStar was dealing quite well with slow links between the CPU and the terminal: you could type while it was trying to refresh the menus and the workspace. In the worst case, if you typed really fast, it'd only paint the characters you typed and nothing else. The timing was done such that it took into account the terminal baudrate, so things suitably improved when you'd switch the baudrate to something faster (38400 was a big deal back then, many systems only supported 19200 and defaulted to 4800 or 9600bps).
These days there are plenty of applications where everything is unresponsive due to paging just a tiny part of the UI. You'd think that the hot path would be resident and responsive, and that the GUI systems would cope with multiple application threads all doing GUI operations. Alas, neither X11 nor winapi got that right, and I don't know offhand whether multithreaded UI operations are allowed by OS X. Heck, you'd think that message-based interthread/interprocess communications would enable one to queue messages in face of stalled threads (say disk I/O stalls), and let the core user experience stay on par with expectations circa 1980.
Paging is the sole killer of user experience in modern applications, and it's not easy to work around it in environments where only one thread in a process can paint on the screen.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Before they collect you.
It's not called image editing, it's called "correcting the truth". These images are here for the Premier's aid, to help him remember things. If he doesn't need to remember a troublesome commissar, why keep him in there?!
That the Russians were really good at math.
You'd be written in and out of the "history" books.
Zinoviev died, and was written out.
Trotski was murdered in Mexico, and was written out.
Hundreds and thousands were written out of existence, their tombstones chiseled clean.
[citation needed]
What is it with people? You should not just be able to say Citation needed at whim. There are times in life where if you haven't done the research you should just not say anything at all. Go read a book. Go to a library. Get off your computer, and stop acting like you care if you actually do not. This is not wikipedia, this is slashdot. Stalin and Soviet history is not a hard topic to learn about.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
It's actually quite easy to think of a better citation. The Gulag Archipelago is a work of fiction; Solzhenitsyn has in later life admitted that, especially in regards to the overall numbers, he had made things up. This is not denying reality of what the Soviet regime was up to in those years - simply that you don't want to use the Gulag Archipelago as your primary historical citation.
Obligatory it is!
Could someone who knows Russian kindly translate the voice over in the video?
Love sees no species.
So what? Photoshop was not the first pixel manipulator, not by far even.
"Citation needed" usually gets on my nerves, but in this case, I must say to you: WOOOSH!!
Tip: If you're able to provide documentation of a person or event being "written out of history", then they weren't written out of history.
Only to people who are ignorant of the history of technology and of computers in particular.
Contrary to what Space Nutters would have you believe, computers didn't magically appear overnight because of the Moon shot, but computers are useful for many things and have been in use for a long time.
Yes, deluded fools like tomhudson for example who honestly think we only have computers today because of the few computers used by Apollo, completely ignoring and discarding the real, TRUE rich history of computing.
I was working for a defense contractor in the 80s. We developed a missile that used an imaging infrared seeker in the nose for guidance. We did image manipulations that would know your socks off. We developed most of it using Vax systems and later, with a few Silicon Graphics boxes for simulations. Even in the 80s our gear was way better than what that video showed of the soviets. Bah!
I was using tools/computers very similar, if not more advanced during this same time period.
In Soviet Russia, the photos enhance you.
A fine tradition dating back all the way to the pharaohs and probably before even them. Still goes on too, albeit in a more restricted form. Eg. Texas removing Thomas Jefferson from textbooks. History is malleable and, more often than not, written by the powerful.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Now that's something I didn't know.
Lol must be hard to edit on it, but what about the time where in 1969s and so NASA hired retouchers.
what did they use??
http://anime720.com/ tell me there in a comment or so, thanks
No wonder they had advanced tools for retouching pictures. The Soviets were masters at removing officials from pictures (after they'd been thrown out of the party and/or sent to the gulags) almost from the beginning of their rule.
Examples here:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html
Heh... Function follows need I guess.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
Only if you assume that history is global. It isn't, however, it's merely shared between actors who can freely exchange information.
History is not about what actually happened, it's about what we think had happened.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Solzhenitsyn was a religious fanatic and writer of fiction, not a neutral historian.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it