Today I installed again PhotoShop on my MacBook Air (painfully going trough a reactivation process on the phone since I had forgotten deactivating it on the old MacBook).
Back in 1989, my father started importing in Italy a little boxy scanner for 35mm slides called Barney Scan. It was the first scanner to use fiber optics to backlight slides.
But by far the most interesting feature of this scanner was the software that came with it. It allowed to do some very cool effects using multiple channels, something I had never seen before and immediately fall in love with.
That summer I was working with movie director Dante Majorana on the special effects of a movie titled “Orlando Sei“, and I remember flying back and forth to Rome taking with me the NuBus card of that scanner, without which the software would not work.
The same software was later licensed to Adobe, they renamed it PhotoShop and the rest is history.
Apparently only 200 Barney Scan scanners were sold.
Which means that I’m one of the first 200 PhotoShop users. 20 years ago. <sigh>