History of Adobe

Adobe’s first products following PostScript were digital fonts beginning with their proprietary Type 1 fonts. Apple later developed TrueType fonts, a competing format which it licensed to Microsoft. TrueType had certain advantages: it provided not only full scalability, but also precise control of the pixel pattern created by the font’s outlines. A few months later Adobe published the Type 1 specification, and soon released the “Adobe Type Manager” software, which allowed for WYSIWYG scaling of Type 1 fonts on screen, just like TrueType (though without the precise pixel-level control). However, these moves were too late to stop the rise of TrueType, which quickly became the standard for business and the average Windows user, with Type 1 remaining the standard in the graphics/publishing market. In 1996, the company, in combination with Microsoft, announced the OpenType font format, and in 2003 Adobe completed the conversion of its library of Type 1 fonts to OpenType.

In the mid-1980s, soon after introducing PostScript, Adobe entered the consumer software market with Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based drawing program for the Apple Macintosh. Illustrator was the logical outgrowth of commercializing their in-house font-development software. Additionally, it helped popularize the use of PostScript-enabled laser printers. Unlike MacDraw (then the standard Macintosh vector drawing program), Illustrator described all shapes with more flexible Bézier curves, providing a level of accuracy not seen in other programs. Font rendering in Illustrator, however, was left to the Macintosh’s QuickDraw libraries and would not be superseded by a PostScript-like approach until Adobe’s own Adobe Type Manager software was introduced.

In 1989, Adobe introduced what was to become its flagship product, Adobe Photoshop for the Macintosh. Although Photoshop 1.0 had competitors, it was extremely stable and well-featured-and Adobe had the resources to market it. The combination enabled Photoshop to soon dominate its market