1994 – Photoshop 3.0, Creo 3244 & ICC
• Layers are the main new feature of Photoshop 3.0, next to other enhancements such as tabbed palettes and support for the RAW formats of different digital cameras.
For a brief period, it actually looks as if Photoshop may lose its grip on the market. Live Picture is a revolutionary image-editing program in which you edit a low-res version of the image with all of the changes being applied to the actual image afterwards. Unfortunately for HSC, advances in CPU-technology gradually make this approach redundant.
• Aldus FreeHand 4 includes multi-page capabilities, making the drawing application suitable for small page lay-out projects. After the Aldus-Adobe merger, Adobe returns FreeHand to Altsys, the original creators, who later get purchased by Macromedia.
• Adobe Systems and Aldus Corporation merge and become the fifth-largest software vendor worldwide, with $500 million in annual sales. Initially it is unclear how the new company will be named but it soon becomes apparent who wears the trousers.
• Creo introduces the 3244 Platesetter, a CtP system based on visible light technology. Large orders from R.R. Donnelly & Sons, who partly financed the development of the engine, make Creo the leading supplier of computer-to-plate systems.
• Iomega launches the ZIP-drive, a kind of superfloppy with a capacity of 100 MB, later expanded to 250 and 750 MB. Apple includes the drive in some of their Macs but the popularity of the drive never recovers from a reliability problem that becomes known as the ‘click of death’.
• The International Color Consortium releases the specifications for ICC profiles. It will take color management another 10 years to grow up but at least the basics are now available.
• The Radius Rocket is an accelerator board that plugs into an expansion slot of a Macintosh.
• Vincent Connare creates Comic Sans for Microsoft. The typeface is designed as a display font for software packaging for kids. It gets abused so much for inappropriate jobs such as letterheads or business cards that an anti-Comic Sans movement erupts.
• Thousands die in the Rwanda massacre.
• The Serbs destroy Sarajevo.
• The IRA declares a cease-fire in Northern Ireland.
• ‘Friends’ airs for the first time.
• ‘Spamming’ is added to the Internet vocabulary.