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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.
But they were doing this stuff with deluxe paint on an Amiga in 1985.
So THAT is how Kim Jong Il was able to be the doctor doing the delivery at his own birth!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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
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
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/
The Chinese have the lead in a lot of things. And cadmium as well.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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!
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.
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
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.
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.