Legal
The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Search
September 11, 2005
The History of Adobe on the Internet
After reading Bill's recent Blog posting I went to the Internet Archive project he references and looked up the first archived Adobe web page from 1996.
This reminded me of another project by Google integrating 20 years of Usenet archives into Google Groups.
I used the Internet for the first time in 1991 when I started to go to school in San Diego (as part of a foreign exchange program). In Germany I had alread used an acoustic coupler back in the 80's to connect to various Bulletin Board Systems and the German Datex-P X.25 Network.
With the Internet access in San Diego I discovered a new world of applications like FTP, Gopher and eventually also Usenet news groups. Fast forward 15 years and this seems to be ancient history. A history I believe is important to be preserved similar to old hardware finding its way into museums.
After Google completed the project of indexing the Usenet (the ones which they were able to assemble from different archives dating back to 1981) they created this interesting collection of links with important Usenet postings. Among others it includes references to the first mention of Microsoft and the first "Me too" post (OK, maybe not that important).
Inspired by the list I started to do my own research and compiled a list of postings documenting the history of Adobe on Usenet.
21 Aug 1982 – First mention of John Warnock and Chuck Geschke
22 Sep 1984 - First mention of Adobe and Postscript
4 Jul 1986 – First mention of Adobe IPO plans
11 Jan 1987 – First mention of Adobe Illustrator
20 Sep 1989 – Apple/Microsoft Font Technology Announcement
26 Sep 1989 – The Font Wars
3 Feb 1990 – First mention of Adobe Photoshop
6 Mar 1990 - Adobe Type 1 Font Specification Available
18 May 1990 – First mention of Apple Quicktime
28 Oct 1991 – First mention of Adobe Carousel (Codename for Acrobat)
17 Jan 1993 – First mention of Adobe Acrobat
9 Jun 1993 – First mention of Portable Document Format Reference Manual
16 Mar 1994 - Adobe Systems and Aldus Corporation Announce to Merge
16 Mar 1994 – Discussion about the Future of Adobe Illustrator and Aldus FreeHand
23 Jun 1995 – Adobe Frame Acquistion
10 Jul 1995 - Netscape integrates Acrobat
This is by no means complete. So if you find additional interesting historic postings just write a comment.
Comments
With no doubt the June 23rd mention of Adobe acquiring Frame was one of the most depressing things to get discussed on the web.
It was a pity that the Frame technology (the ultimate thesis/research documentation tool) was allowed to languish, and has now been entirely dropped on the Macintosh side of things.
There has never been another long document tool out there that was as nice as FM.
First Usenet posting from 1997 by Matthias
here?
Peter
Well, this is another Matthias Zeller and I do not want to take credit for his postings. But thanks for looking me up!
Here is my first posting. Nothing exciting unfortunately.