Category: Timeline Stories

The French Villard de Honnecourt is an enigmatic and power-minded medieval person, considered by some people as a precursor of the great Leonardo da Vinci (in 1859 Prosper Mérimée compared Villard to Leonardo for his multiplicity of interests).

Very few is known now about Villard (he pictured himself as a soldier and a master builder), actually he is known only through a portfolio of 33 parchment leaves (we don’t know how many leaves are missing from this batch, likely around 15 folio leaves), containing approximately 250 drawings, preserved in Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (see it). There is no record of him in any known other document. We are not sure even what exactly his name was, because in his manuscripts are given two names—Wilars dehonecort and Vilars de Honecourt. Some historians suppose that he was born in the village of Honnecourt-sur-l’Escault (Nord), south of Cambrai, in Picardy, northern France, not only due to the resemblance of names but also because the language, which he used in his manuscript (besides Latin) is basically the Picard dialect of Old French.

Villard’s fame is due to the uniqueness of his drawings. There are some identifiable monuments in his drawings, according to them the drew date was in the first quarter of the 13^th century. So probably Villard lived sometime at the end of the 12^th and beginning of the 13^th century. He claimed to have been in many lands and it is clear from his drawings and inscriptions, that he has visited many French towns, as well as Switzerland, and Hungary (Rheims, Laon, Chartres, Lausanne, Meaux).

The subjects of Villard’s drawings and inscriptions fall into several categories: architecture, animals, carpentry, geometry, masonry, surveying, etc., and what is important for this site—mechanical devices. It is unknown, however, if Villard devised these machines himself, or he is describing something, that he had seen somewhere during his journeys. Among the mechanical devices, Villard sketched are lifting devices, a trebuchet, a perpetual-motion machine, a water-driven saw, and several automata. The interesting for us machines are depicted in Drawing Nr. 43 (see nearby drawing).

This drawing is perhaps the most dear to historians of technology. This collection of machines, including an automatic sawmill, automaton, and what has been claimed as one of the earliest illustrations of a mechanical clock escapement, has generated much interest.

The figures feature five devices:
1. Upper-left—a self-operating sawmill.
2. Upper-right—an improved crossbow “…that never misses.”
3. Middle-left—Escapement, “How to make an angel, keep pointing his finger toward the sun.”
4. Middle-right—Hoist, “How to make the most powerful engine for lifting weights.”
5. Bottom—Bird automaton: “How to make the eagle face the Deacon while the Gospel is being read.”

As you can see, all the figures are rather simplified, some kind of technical sketches, that make perfect sense to someone who is familiar with the item being drawn, but to the uninitiated may not make much sense at all. The sawmill, for example, is drawn in a strange flat perspective, presenting both a side and top view simultaneously. In the upper left corner, the wavy lines indicate a stream, which turns the big spoked waterwheel. This axle then turns the center smaller ratchet wheel with six spikes on its rim, which is the automatic feed mechanism for the log, shown resting in four pairs of guide posts. The waterwheel’s axle also turns the spokes at the bottom which engage on the triangular frame at the bottom left of the illustration. As the axle turns, each spoke in turn comes down on the right leg of the frame, pushing it (together with the saw blade) down, thus cutting the wood. The saw is then lifted by the sapling pole (indicated by branch stumps along its length) back up to ready it for the next power stroke.

The eagle automata at the bottom of the drawing is again a quite simplified and unclear picture of such a device.

Villard de Honnecourt was one of the first scientists (certainly the first European), who described a perpetual motion machine. It is known that in the 1150s the Indian mathematician and astronomer Bhaskara II devised a wheel, consisting of curved or tilted spokes partially filled with mercury. The design of Villard (see the nearby drawing, the inscription reads: Often have experts striven to make a wheel turn of its own accord. Here is a way to do it with an uneven number of mallets and with quicksilver.) was different and described the so-called overbalanced wheel. Let’s mention only, that the great Leonardo da Vinci, who was generally against perpetuum mobile devices, also designed several overbalanced wheels.

To my mind, Villard de Honnecourt was not an inventor, but a naturally intelligent and full of imagination medieval man (most probably a mason, metalworker, or carpenter with a flair for drawing), who saw a lot of interesting people, buildings, machines, etc. during his journeys, and decided to describe his impressions and his dreams in a manuscript, which managed to survive to our time, while many others didn’t. In any case, his manuscript deserves our attention and esteem.

The mathematician and engineer Heron (also known as Hero) of Alexandria, Egypt, (Greek: Ἥρων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς) is considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity and representer of the Roman and Hellenistic scientific tradition. Much of Heron’s original manuscripts and designs have been lost (he wrote at least 13 books), but fortunately, some of his works were preserved mainly in Arabic manuscripts.

Heron (c. 10–70 AD) was most probably of Greek origin, although a few historians believe that he was Babylonian or Mesopotamian. From his writings, it is reasonable to deduce that he taught at the Museum in Alexandria, which included the famous Library of Alexandria. Admittedly some of Heron’s ideas were derived from the earlier works of Ctesibius of Alexandria, Philon of Byzantion, and Archimedes.

Survived to the present works of Heron are:
1. Metrica—Three books for the determination of areas and volume of objectives.
2. Pneumatica (Spiritalia)—Two books, a collection of around 80 mechanical apparatus, that work with air, steam, or hydraulic pressure.
3. Belopoeica—A collection of war machines (artillery).
4. Mechanica—Three books on how to move heavy objects using gears, winches, pulleys, screws, wedges, levers, cranes, and sledges.
5. Dioptra—Practical and mathematical methods for land surveying. It also included information about the Dioptra, the forerunner of the modern theodolite, which allowed surveyors to calculate angles and heights with great precision. The text also described the odometer, used for calculating distances via the rotation of a wheel of known circumference.
6. Catoptrica—For the geometric linear propagation of light, reflection, and use of mirrors.
And the most important book in the context of this site:
7. Automata (Περὶ αὐτομάτων)—A collection of constructions called miracles (thaumata) for temples. Heron describes automatic rotating objectives, noise such as thunder, automatic opening, and closing doors, statues that pour wine, etc.

In his work Automata, Heron describes the workings of several bird automatons, several other automatic devices are described in Pneumatica. Hero also invented many mechanisms for the Greek theater, considered the “world’s first practical programmable machine”, including an entirely mechanical play almost ten minutes in length, powered by a binary-like system of ropes, knots, and simple machines operated by a rotating cylindrical cogwheel. The sound of thunder was produced by the mechanically-timed dropping of metal balls onto a hidden drum. Heron constructed a three-wheeled cart that could carry a group of automata to the front of a stage where they would perform for an audience. Power came from a falling weight that pulled on a string wrapped around the cart’s drive axle.

It is believed that Heron described also the first odometer (device for measuring distance). He built a slot machine (insert a coin and it dispenses holy water), a hydraulic mechanism for mysteriously opening temple doors when a burnt offering heated water beneath the altar, and a cute little engine that whirled around under the force of steam through it.

Let’s examine one of the automata from the book Pneumatica. It is for an automaton, which may be made to drink at any time, a liquid being presented to it.

…by the aid of running water, the animal may be made to drink on the revolution of a carved figure of Pan. Let A B C D be a pedestal, air-tight on every side, and divided into two chambers by a partition. On the surface place the animal, and let the tube E F G pass through its mouth. Within the pedestal, in the lower chamber, let there be a bent siphon, H K L, the lower leg projecting from the bottom: and let a funnel, M N, pass through the middle of the partition, its tube reaching nearly to the bottom. On the pedestal A B C D place another pedestal, 0 X, on which the figure of Pan, P R, is to stand, having attached to it the rod S which projects below into the pedestal. To S let the tube T U be fastened, at the end of which is the cup U Q, attached to and communicating with the tube. Let the tube be of such a length that, when the figure P R turns round, the cup U Q will be directly above the funnel M N. On the pedestal, and communicating with it, and directly above the funnel M N, place the cup W Y. Let the stream Z, (which must be greater than the discharge through the siphon H K L), flow into W Y: the liquid will pass through M N into the lower part of the pedestal, the contained air passing out through E F G: and now the pedestal will continue full as the influx is greater than the discharge. But, when we turn the figure P R round, the cup U Q will intercept the stream Z, which will pass elsewhere through the tube T U, and, as the water no longer flows into the lower chamber of the pedestal, the siphon H K L will empty it, and the air will enter through E F G. Thus when the cup is applied, the animal will drink as before.

Another interesting automaton from Pneumatica. This time for an automaton, the head of which continues attached to the body, after a knife has entered the neck at one side, passed completely through it, and out at the other; the animal will drink immediately after the operation.

An animal shall be made to drink while it is being severed in two. In the mouth of the animal (upper left figure), let there be a tube, A B, and in the neck another, C D, passing along through one of the outer feet. Between these tubes let a male cylinder, E F, pass, to which are attached toothed bars, G and H. Above G place a portion of a toothed wheel, K, and, in like manner, beneath H a portion of a toothed wheel, L. Overall let there be a wheel, M, the inner rim of which is thicker than the outer; and let sections be cut out of this wheel by the three circles M, N, and X, so that the interval between each division may be equal to the radius of the wheel. Let the rim or felly be likewise divided by the circles, so that the circumference of the wheel will no longer be a circle. Having made an incision, 0 P, in the upper part of the neck, and severed the head within the incision, make in it a circular Cavity broader below than above, as it were a female tube shaped like an axe, which will contain two sides of the hexagon inscribed in the circle. Let this cavity be it S, in which the entire rim M N X will revolve in such a manner that, before one division disappears, the beginning of the next will succeed, and similarly with the third: so that, if a pin be inserted through the wheel, the wheel will revolve, and the head of the animal adhere to the neck. Now, if a knife is passed down through the incision 0 P, it will enter one of the clefts of the wheel M, and confine it in the circular cavity; and, descending lower, it will touch the projecting tooth of the part K of the wheel, which, being forced downwards, will fit its teeth into those of the bar G, and the bar being pushed back will bring the cylinder out of the tube A B. The knife, passing through the intervening space, will still descend and fall upon the projecting tooth of part L of the wheel; and this, being forced downwards, and fitting its teeth into the toothed bar H, will drive the cylinder out of C D and fit it into A B. This cylinder is an interior tube fitted into the two tubes, that, namely, in the mouth of the animal, and that reaching from the incision in the neck to the hinder foot. When the knife has passed quite through the neck, and the tube E F has touched both A B and c D, let water be offered to the animal, and a pair of sliding tubes, placed under the herdsman, be turned round. When the herdsman revolves, the water above will flow downwards along tube C D E F A B, and the current of air caused by the stream of water will attract the water offered to the mouth of the animal. Of course, the sliding tubes are so arranged that, as the herdsman turns round, the holes in them coincide. The same result can be brought about without the aid of a stream of water in the following manner. Take once more a pedestal perfectly air-tight, A B C D (lower left figure), having a partition across the middle, E F. Let the tube from the mouth of the animal, G H K, lead into the pedestal, and another tube, L M N, pass through the surface A D and the partition E F. In the tube, L M N, perforate a hole, X, just above the partition E F, and let another tube, 0 P, fit into it closely, having a hole, R, corresponding with the hole X. To the tube O P attach a figure of Pan, or some other figure with a fierce look, and, when the figure is turned towards the animal, it shall not drink, as though frightened; when the figure turns away, it shall drink. Now, if we pour water into the compartment A D E F through a hole, G’, which must afterward be carefully closed with wax or some other substance, it will be found that, if the holes R and X are made to coincide, the water which was poured in will pass into the compartment E B C F. As A D E F becomes empty, it will attract the air through the mouth of the figure, which will then drink when a cup is presented to it.

It seems also that the use of an analog train of gear wheels (linked so that each time one wheel completes a revolution the next wheel turns one-tenth of a revolution, thus recording a carry in many types of mechanical calculating machines) is very ancient and appears in the works of Heron of Alexandria.

Very little is known about the Greek scientist Philon (ca. 280–220 BC) (sometimes called Philo Mechanicus) of Byzantion (Greek: Φίλων ὁ Βυζάντιος). Byzantion is an ancient Greek city (founded in 667 BC), a precursor of Constantinople, the Eastern Roman Empire’s capital, and modern Turkey’s Istanbul.

The most information about Philon’s life comes from the only work, that has survived (at least major parts have survived) at present—Compendium of Mechanics (Mechanike syntaxis). In this treatise Philon writes about the catapult which was recently invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria, thus we can date Philon fairly accurately and we know that he wrote his treatise Mechanics around 250 BC. In this treatise, Philon describes also journeys he had made to Rhodes and to Alexandria to study catapults.

As far as we know Philon’s Mechanics had nine books:
1. Isagoge (Introduction to Mathematics)
2. Mochlica (on the levers, general mechanics)
3. Limenopoeica (on the building of harbors)
4. Belopoeica (on catapults (artillery))
5. Pneumatica (on devices operated by air or water pressure)
6. Automatiopoeica (on automatics (mechanical toys and diversions))
7. Parasceuastica (on the building of fortresses)
8. Poliorcetica (on siegecraft (besieging and defending towns))
9. Peri Epistolon (on secret letters)

The text of Books 4, 5, 7, and 8 have survived, while the rest has been lost. Fortunately, Philon has the habit of cross-referencing fully in his work so we can learn quite a bit about what was contained in the lost sections by studying the surviving ones.

The book Pneumatica includes not only the first description of a water mill in history but also the earliest known escapement mechanism, as part of a washstand automaton (see the nearby image).

Unfortunately, the most interesting in the context of this site part of Philon’s treatise—Automatiopoeica, didn’t manage to survive to the present time, so we can only guess what kind of automatic machines it describes. However, in Pneumatica he described also a human-like automatic device in the form of a maid, holding a jug of wine in his right hand. When one placed a cup in the palm of the robot’s left hand, it automatically poured wine initially and then poured water into the cup, mixing it when desired.

How did the machine operate? Inside the maid, there are two airtight containers (with wine and water). At their bottom, there are two tubes, leading their content through the right hand to the lip of the jug of wine. Tow air pipes start at the top of the containers, go through their bottom, and lead curved into the stomach. Maid’s left arm is linked, through the articulation, to the shoulders, while a winding rod (spring), that is positioned in an extension of the restraining rod raises it. Two pipes start at the same point (joint) and come down (going through and freeing the curved perforated ends of the air pipes). The pipes of the joint have two holes or tears at their ends, with the hole in contact with the container of wine preceding that, which is connected with the water container. When the cup is placed into the palm, the hand comes down and the tubes of the joint are lifted. The hole in one pipe is aligned with the air pipe of the wine container, air enters the container and wine flows from the tube into the cup. When the cup of wine is half full, the hand (due to weight) descends further, the passage of the air pipe of wine obstructs and the flow stops. At the same time, the other tube is aligned with the air pipe of the water container and it begins to flow, thus diluting the wine. When the cup is full, the hand (due to weight) descends further, the passage of the air pipe of wine obstructs and the flow stops. If the cup is removed at any moment, the left hand rises, and the tubes of the joint descend, cutting off the air pipes, creating a vacuum in the containers and stopping the liquid flow. The maid then fills the cup with wine or diluted water of the desired quantity, depending on the time it is pulled from her palm.

Philon’s works had a great influence over the next generations of mechanics, and are mentioned as a source by many later scientists like Vitruvius, Heron of Alexandria, many Arabic scientists, etc.

One of the most genius and popular computer games of all time, Tetris, was conceived by the Russian Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. Алексей Леонидович Пажитнов (Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov) was born in 1955, in Moscow, Russia. After graduating from the Moscow Institute of Aviation, he was hired as a programmer at the Computing Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D center. Pajitnov worked in the field of artificial intelligence and speech recognition.

Pajitnov was interested in the field of computer games from the very beginning of his career and the Tetris was not the first game, he conceived. Initially, he created several psychology-related games. Sometime in 1984, he took to his workplace a puzzle game, just bought in the “Детский мир” for 35 kopeek (“World of Children” is a big children’s store in Moscow).

The name of the game was Pentamino. It consisted of plastic 5-cube figures, just like those in Tetris. Pajitnov started to twiddle with the figures trying to imagine how to implement this game on computers. First, he decided to cut off a piece from the cubes, in order to simplify the shape of the figures and thus to accelerate the computer processing. Then he created a simpler computer game, called Genetic Engineering, in which the player had to move the 4-square pieces (called tetramino) around the screen using cursor keys. The player could assemble various shapes. The game however was not very successful.

The breakthrough came when Pajitnov decided to drop the figures in a rectangular glass and piling up at the bottom of the glass. Two weeks later, on 6 June 1984, the first version was ready, written in Pascal language for Electronica 60 (Электроника 60 was a Russian copy of DEC LSI-11 computer). The game occupied only 2.7 KB of storage memory. In the name of the game “Tetris” Pajitnov combined two words: the name of the original game—”tetramino” and his favorite sport—”tennis”.

Pajitnov was assisted in the creation of Tetris initially by Dmitry Pavlovsky, his colleague from the Institute, and later by Vadim Gerasimov, a 16-year-old high school schoolboy, who worked and played with IBM PCs in the Computer Center. Gerasimov ported the game for the operating system MS-DOS of IBM PC (using Borland’s Turbo Pascal) and was in charge of graphical design.

Pajitnov, Pavlovsky, and Gerasimov created a team, planning to make some dozen addictive computer games for the PC and put them together in one system, called a Computer Funfair. They also dreamed about selling the games, but this part seemed unusual and difficult in the communist Soviet Union, where making and selling something privately was a dangerous affair.

The first Tetris ran in an MS-DOS text mode, using colored space symbols to represent squares of tetraminos. The game could even automatically recognize the IBM monochrome video card, adjusting the way it drew on the screen. The last version of the game was one of the first to use proper timer delays, in order not to run too fast on the newer and faster machines, which did almost all other games then.

When all efforts to sell the games failed, the group of Pajitnov decided to give friends free copies of all the games, including Tetris. Thus the games quickly spread around the country. When in 1986 the freely distributed PC version of Tetris got outside of the Soviet Union and a foreign company expressed an interest in licensing Tetris, Pajitnov decided to abandon all the games but Tetris, which made Pavlovsky very unhappy and destroyed the team.

After Tetris Pajitnov created a sequel, called Welltris, which has the same principle, but in a three-dimensional environment where the player sees the playing area from above.

Pajitnov moved to the United States in 1991 and later, in 1996, founded the Tetris Company. In the same year, he began working for Microsoft, where worked for the Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection, MSN Mind Aerobics, and MSN Games groups. He left Microsoft in 2005. In August 2005, WildSnake Software announced that Pajitnov would be collaborating with them to release a new line of puzzle games. In 1996, GameSpot named him the fourth most influential computer game developer of all time.

Biography of Alexey Pajitnov

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (Алексей Леонидович Пажитнов) was born on 16 April 1955 (or 14 March 1956 according to other sources), in Moscow, Russia. His father was Леонид Николаевич Пажитнов (1930—1997), an art critic and philosopher, a son of the famous actor Николай Викторович Пажитнов (1907-1976). His mother was Ирина Ивановна Рубанова (born 1933), a journalist who used to write for both newspapers and a film magazine (Советский экран).

It was through his parents that Pajitnov gained exposure to the arts, eventually developing a passion for cinema. He accompanied his mother to many film screenings, including the Moscow Film Festival. Alexey was also mathematically inclined, enjoying puzzles and problem-solving.

Leonid and Irina divorced in 1967. For several years, Alexey lived with his mother in a one-bedroom apartment owned by the state. The two were eventually able to move into a private apartment at 49 Gertsen Str. when Pajitnov was 17. He graduated from Moscow Mathematical School Nr. 91 and later went on to study applied mathematics at the Moscow Aviation Institute.

In 1977, Alexey worked as a summer intern at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Once he graduated in 1979, he accepted a job there working on speech recognition at the Academy’s Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre  When the Computing Centre received new equipment, its researchers would write a small program for it in order to test its computing capabilities, and this became his excuse for making games. Computer games were fascinating to Alexey because they offered a way to bridge the gap between logic and emotion, and he held interests in both mathematics and puzzles, as well as the psychology of computing. His first game, Muddled Casino, he developed in 1882.

Pajitnov, together with his friend and business partner (they founded a company in 1989) Владимир Похилько (Vladimir Pokhilko), moved to the United States in early 1991, followed by his family 6 months later.

Pajitnov married Нина Васильевна (born 25.08.1953), a translator from English, in 1981 and they had two sons: Пётр (Peter) (b. 1982), and Дмитрий (Dmitri) (11.4.1986-died 3 July 2017 as he was skiing down Mount Rainie). He lives in Clyde Hill, WA, together with his wife and son.

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pajitnov issued a statement condemning the war that called Vladimir Putin a “soulless crazy dictator” and that “his hateful regime will fall down and the normal peaceful way of living will be restored in Ukraine and, hopefully in Russia”.

Sometime in the fall of 1987, the 27 years old Ph.D. candidate in computer vision at the University of Michigan—Thomas Knoll, was trying to write a computer program to display grayscale images on a monochrome bitmap monitor. Because the program wasn’t directly related to his thesis on computer vision, Knoll thought it had limited value at best. The program, called Display, Knoll wrote on his Macintosh Plus computer at home. Little did he know that this initial code would be the very beginning of the real phenomenon, that would be known as Photoshop.

Thomas was the son of Glenn Knoll (1935-2014), a professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan, who lived with his family in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Glenn was a photo enthusiast, who maintained a darkroom in the family basement. He was also a technology aficionado intrigued by the emergence of the personal computer. His two sons, Thomas (born 1960) and John (born 1962), inherited their father’s inquisitive nature. And the vision for future greatness began with their exposure to Glenn’s basement darkroom and with the Apple II Plus that he brought home for research projects.

Even though Thomas loved hands-on darkroom work and developed film and made prints, he too had a keen interest in computers and programming. In 1987 he purchased an Apple Macintosh Plus, to help him with his Ph.D. work. Much to his disappointment, the Mac couldn’t display gray-scale levels in his images. To solve that problem, Thomas wrote some command line utilities that did various imaging processing steps (e.g. to simulate the gray-scale effect, etc.), before tackling something bigger, the Display program.

When Thomas demonstrated his image-processing tools to his younger brother John, who was on vacation in Ann Arbor, he embraced the idea. John worked at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) in Marin County, California. ILM was the visual effects arm of the famous film production company Lucasfilm, and John was experimenting with computers to create special effects. In the book CG 101: A Computer Graphics Industry Reference, John says: “Image processing is the fundamental basis of any of that kind of work, and Tom had written a bunch of image processing tools. As Tom showed me his work, it struck me how similar it was to the image processing tools on the Pixar [Pixar was an image computer John had just seen a graphics demo on at ILM]”. Thus the pair began to collaborate on a larger, more cohesive application, which they dubbed Display.

At the end of 1987 John arranged to purchase a new Macintosh II, the first color-capable model of the series, which cost almost 10000 USD. At the same time, Thomas rewrote the code for Display to work in color. In the ensuing months, the brothers worked on expanding Display’s capability. At John’s urging, Thomas added gamma correction tools, as well as the ability to read and write various file formats, while John developed image processing routines that would later become filter plug-ins. Thomas developed also the unique capability to create soft-edged selections that would allow local changes and also developed such features as Levels for adjusting tonality, Color Balance, Hue, and Saturation for adjusting the color, and painting capabilities.

In the beginning of 1988 however, the project was closed to be cancelled. Thomas’ fellowship money had run out and his wife was expecting their first child. Thomas was feeling pressure to finish what he was doing and find a permanent job. Fortunately, he decided to give himself six more months to finish a beta version and let John shop it around Silicon Valley. John thought they might have the basis of a commercially viable product, while Thomas was reluctant: “Do you have any idea how much work it is to write a commercial application?” he asked John. But with his naive optimism, John convinced Thomas it would be worth the effort. “I’ll figure out how to make money with this,” he told his brother. Well, John was right, but so was Thomas. It did take a lot of work, but they will make a lot of money.

The brothers decided to choose a more appropriate name for the product. The initial name—Display, was not appropriate anymore, because the program got more powerful, so they needed a name that would reflect what it did. The next working names were Image Pro and then Photo Lab (even PhotoHut was considered), but each of those was shot down in turn by similar products in that market space. Then, during a program demo to some company, Thomas confided to someone that he was having problems naming the program. The confidant suggested PhotoShop, and that became the program’s working name. (the ‘S’ of the shop was capitalized, but later the inter cap was removed.)

When John started shopping around for a company to invest in Photoshop, traveling all over Silicon Valley, he gave program demos to a number of companies, including a company named Adobe Systems. This will become a lucky strike. At his time Thomas remained in Ann Arbor, Michigan, fine-tuning the program, while John John kept pushing his brother to add new features, he even wrote a simple manual to make the program more understandable.

John finally succeeded in attracting the attention of somebody, namely the scanner manufacturer BarneyScan, who decided that the program would be of use to people who owned their scanners. A short-term deal was worked out, and the first public iteration of the software was introduced as Barneyscan XP. About 200 copies of the program, now in Version 0.87, were shipped with Barneyscan scanners.

Around this time, John demonstrated the program to engineers at Apple Computer. It was a huge hit. Apple asked John to leave a couple of copies. There followed the first incident of Photoshop pirating. Seems that the Apple engineers shared the program with some friends, a lot of friends!

Subsequently, John returned to Adobe for another demonstration. Russell Brown, Adobe’s primary art director, was blown away by the program. He had just signed an NDA disclosure agreement with Letraset, to view their new image-editing program, ColorStudio. He was convinced that Photoshop was better. The whole of Adobe’s internal creative team loved the product.

With a great deal of enthusiasm, Adobe decided to buy the license to distribute Photoshop. In the September of 1988, the Knoll brothers and Fred Mitchell, head of Adobe Acquisitions, made the deal with a handshake. It would be April 1989, when the final legal agreements were worked out. The key phrase in that deal was “license to distribute.” Adobe didn’t completely buy out the program until years after Photoshop had become a huge success. It was a smart move on the Knolls’ part to work out a royalty agreement based on distribution. After the legal agreements were signed, Thomas and John started developing a shipping version—Adobe Photoshop 1.0, which was shipped in February 1990, using a single diskette (see the nearby image). Adobe decided to keep the working name Photoshop, but not until an exhaustive attempt to find a better name provided nothing better.

That first version of Photoshop was written primarily in Pascal for the Apple Macintosh, with some machine language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor where execution efficiency was important. It was certainly a success, despite the usual slew of bugs. Adobe’s key marketing decision was to present Photoshop as a mass-market, fairly simple tool for anyone to use, rather than most graphics software of the time, which was aimed at specialists. With Photoshop, you could be achieving the same things on your home desktop Mac that were previously only possible with thousands of dollars of advanced equipment at least, that was the implicit promise. There was also the matter of pricing. Letraset’s ColorStudio, which had launched shortly before, cost $1995; Photoshop was less than $1000.

Thomas wrote all the code for Photoshop in Ann Arbor, while John developed and wrote plug-ins in California. Some of the Adobe people thought John’s features were gimmicky and didn’t belong in a serious application. They viewed the product as a tool for retouching, not special effects, so John had to find a way to “sneak” them into the program. Later those plug-ins have become one of the most powerful aspects of Photoshop, which extended its functionality and act like mini-editors that modify the image. The most common type is filter plugins that provide various image effects. They are located in the Filter menu. Photoshop plugin API has become a standard, and many other image editors also support Photoshop Plugins.

The second version of Photoshop, 2.0, was also only for Mac OS and was shipped in June 1991. It introduced paths, CMYK color, and EPS Rasterization.

Until 1993 Photoshop was still a Mac-only application, but its success warranted a version for the burgeoning Windows graphics market. Porting it was not a trivial task: a whole new team, headed by Bryan Lamkin, was brought in for the PC. Oddly, although there were other significant new features such as 16-bit file support, this iteration was shipped as version 2.5. From this moment, all versions will be provided both for Mac and Windows operating systems, there are also several versions for IRIX and Solaris.

By general consensus, the addition of layers (together with Tabbed Palettes) in version 3.0, launched in November 1994, has been the single most important aspect of Photoshop development, and probably the feature which finally persuaded many artists to try it. Yet the concept of layers wasn’t unique to Photoshop. HSC (later to become MetaCreations), was concurrently developing Live Picture, an image-editing application including just such a facility. While an excellent program in its own right, Live Picture was vastly overpriced on its launch, leaving Photoshop 3.0 for both Mac and Windows to clean up.

Version 5 (launched in May 1998) introduced color management and the History palette, with its extra ‘nonlinear history’ behavior, which certainly opened up whole new creative possibilities. A major update, version 5.5, bundled Adobe’s package ImageReady in an entirely new iteration, giving Photoshop excellent Web-specific features.

Layer styles and improved text handling popped up in version 6 in September 2000, and the Healing brush in version 7, in March 2002. Photoshop CS (version 8), released in October 2003 introduced sorting and sharing capabilities, the Histogram Palette which monitors changes in the image as they are made to the document, and Match Color, which reads color data to achieve a uniform expression throughout a series of pictures. Photoshop CS2, released in May 2005, expanded on its predecessor with an upgraded Spot Healing Brush, which is mainly used for handling common photographic problems such as blemishes, red-eye, noise, blurring, and lens distortion, Smart Objects, which allows users to scale and transform images and vector illustrations without losing image quality, as well as linked duplicates of embedded graphics so that a single edit updates across multiple iterations.

Each new version of Photoshop added various creative features and tools. The latest version of Photoshop is 23.2 (called Adobe Photoshop 2022), and it was launched on 12 Jan 2023.

The US company Aldus Corporation was founded on 1 February 1984 in Seattle, Washington, by Paul Brainerd (born 1947). Brainerd has a B.S. degree in business administration from the University of Oregon (1970), and an M.A. degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota (1975) and worked at the Minneapolis newspaper Star and Tribune. In 1980 he joined Atex in Redmond, Washington, a company that sold computer-assisted publishing equipment to the newspaper industry. In 1983, the plant was closed, thus Brainerd and five other Atex engineers decided to stay in the Pacific Northwest and start up their own company.

Brainerd and his partners decided to name their company Aldus, after Aldus Pius Manutius (Teobaldo Mannucci) (1449–1515), a famous fifteenth-century Venetian pioneer in publishing, known for standardizing the rules of punctuation and also presenting several typefaces, including the first italic. Manutius went on to found the first modern publishing house, the Aldine Press.

The flagship program of Aldus Co—PageMaker was released in July 1985. This groundbreaking program was the first-ever desktop publishing application and revolutionized the use of personal computers, virtually creating the desktop publishing industry. The term desktop publishing was coined by Brainerd.

PageMaker relied on a graphical user interface, and was initially for the then-new Apple Macintosh, in 1987 for IBM PCs running the then-new Windows 1.0. PageMaker relies on Adobe Systems’ PostScript page description language. Suddenly anyone could design brochures. Publishers had to become computer literate, and Apple started selling Macs and LaserWriters in large numbers. Aldus helped Apple to market its hardware to customers who wanted desktop publishing capabilities. In return, Apple featured Aldus’s software in much of its advertising and also helped the fledgling company distribute its program.

Retailed for $495 PageMaker 1.0 (see the nearby screenshot) included all the basic elements needed to lay out pages: free form drag and drop positioning of page elements, sophisticated type tools, a well-chosen selection of drawing tools, the ability to import text and graphics (most importantly, EPS files) from other applications, and the ability to print to high-resolution PostScript printers with WYSIWYG accuracy. The users could easily create professional-quality books, newspapers, newsletters, brochures, pamphlets, and other graphic products.

PageMaker not only made desktop publishing possible, but it also spawned entire cottage industries for clip art, fonts, service bureau output and scanning, and specialty products for laser printing such as foil overlays. The $495 price point allowed Aldus to have a gross margin of almost 90 percent. It was very inexpensive to produce software in those days, in terms of the floppy disk and the packaging and the documentation. That gave them all the money needed to reinvest in customer service and support and product development.

Aldus succeeded to make the PageMaker program accessible to all kinds of computers and operating systems, signing agreements with Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft Corporation, IBM, Wang Laboratories, and Digital Equipment. Then it decided to offer its program to computer users outside the United States, establishing itself as Europe’s leading producer of desktop publishing software by the spring of 1988. Controlling nearly half of the British, French, and German markets for these products, PageMaker was the world’s fourth most popular software program.

Despite the popularity of PageMaker, Aldus’s status as a single-product company caused some concern among managers and investors. The company needed to move beyond PageMaker to other products and functions in order to continue its rapid growth and remain profitable. Thus in 1987, Aldus introduced FreeHand, a raster graphics drawing program, and SnapShot, an instant electronic photography software package for use on personal computers. Later Aldus presented SuperPaint, Personal Press, Digital Darkroom, PhotoStyler, PressWise, and PageAhead.

In January 1988, sales of the PageMaker program topped 200000, with 90000 copies of the program shipped in the preceding year. That spring, Aldus introduced updated versions of PageMaker for use on the Macintosh and on IBM-compatible PCs. With this advance, Aldus maintained its dominant grip on the desktop publishing market.

PageMaker continued to evolve, reaching new heights with its 1992 version 4.2, which had such essential features as text rotation and a story editor. Despite some interesting marketing ploys, however, Aldus had lost significant market share to the rival QuarkXPress, which had some powerful features, such as color separation, which PageMaker then lacked. Later QuarkXPress continued to gain market share, due largely to ignorance and mythology regarding PageMaker’s capabilities. Most people who used both programs preferred PageMaker, but that didn’t seem to help Aldus, and their dwindling revenues eventually led to their acquisition in 1995 by Adobe, which re-introduced PageMaker as Adobe PageMaker and subsequently updated it to version 6, 6.5, and finally 7 in 2001. Then, Adobe rebranded the next version of PageMaker to Adobe InDesign. InDesign was developed in Seattle by the PageMaker product team. The last released version of Adobe InDesign is CC 2023 (18.2.1) from March 2023.

Biography of Paul Brainerd

Paul Brainerd was born on 17 November 1947 in Medford, a small timber and agricultural-dependent town in Southern Oregon, to Philip (Phil) Franklin Brainerd (1913-1995) and Leta VerNetta Brainerd (1919-2017). Paul grew up working in his parents’ portrait studio and camera shop on Main Street where he learned about business and customer service. The family was not wealthy, but the importance of giving was deeply instilled in Paul and Sherry (his five years younger sister) from a young age. They had a cabin in the national forest at Diamond Lake where spent many days each summer, and the kids were free to roam the woods, exploring the streams and trails and encountering the wild creatures that lived there (see the nearby image).

Paul was an above-average student in high school and played some basketball and football. He used his interest in photography to contribute to the high school yearbook. In 1966 he enrolled in the University of Oregon business administration program. As a student, Paul worked on the college paper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, and got involved in the business, technical, and editorial side of printing and publishing. Learning that a Springfield newspaper was not using its presses at night, he got the Emerald to shift from linotype to the more efficient offset process, saving 50 percent on production costs. This allowed for an expanded paper, causing the student staff to complain about having so many pages to fill. He also organized the Emerald into a not-for-profit corporation, establishing its independence from the University.

In 1970 Brainerd earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business and went on to the University of Minnesota for a Master of Arts degree in journalism with a minor in business (which he got in 1975), where helped manage the school paper there, and then got a job as an assistant to the operations director for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. At the Star Tribune, where he worked for seven years (1973-1980), Paul started working with Atex, a Boston company that was computerizing many of the steps of newspaper production, where he wrote the specifications for the word processing system used by major magazines and newspapers. Brainerd moved to the Northwest where Atex had a research and manufacturing center in Redmond. Kodak bought Atex and closed the Redmond operation in January 1984. Kodak offered Brainerd a job in Boston, but he declined the move and lost his job. He told his mother, “I’ll either be very rich by the time I’m 40, or I’ll be very poor”.

So, at the beginning of 1984, unemployed but with a small nest egg funded by Atex stocks, Brainerd launched his own tech company, hiring four of his laid-off colleagues. Brainerd recounted: “We gave ourselves the task of doing the business plan, building the prototype, writing the functional specification, and raising the money that we’d need to continue. We literally had six months to do it because we only had roughly $100000 in capital, which is what I put up. The engineers worked at half salary and I worked for no salary.” In the summer of 1984, Brainerd set out to raise money for Aldus and their PageMaker product. He pitched to venture capitalists in Seattle and Silicon Valley. Forty-nine turned him down. With only $5000 left in the bank, the 50th, which included former Apple Computer executives, said yes.

After the success of Aldus Corporation in the late 1980s, in 1991, Brainerd stepped out of day-to-day management of the company, to focus on long-term and strategic planning. He had to come back and take over two years later when the company posted quarterly losses. His search for a new executive team led to a breakfast meeting with leaders from Adobe, manufacturer of the PostScript Printer language. In March 1994, Brainerd announced that Aldus would merge with Adobe. He traded his job and three million shares of Aldus in for a seat on the Adobe board and anywhere from $88 million to $112 million in Adobe stock.

Out of work once again, Brainerd formed the Brainerd Foundation to organize and fund a number of groups with an environmental focus. He spoke out and wrote to focus attention on solutions to issues such as global warming. In 1997 Brainerd founded Social Ventures Partners, an organization that works by matching philanthropists, who provide funding and mentorship, with local community organizations. In 2000, Brainerd founded Islandwood, an environmental learning center created to improve access to meaningful, nature-based learning experiences for the region’s children. In 2018, Brainerd founded Camp Glenorchy, an accommodation provider that operates in Glenorchy, New Zealand.

Paul Brainerd is a good man, who very successfully turned from money-making to do-gooding. Respect!

On 24 January 1984, Apple Computer Inc.’s chairman Steve Jobs took to the stage of Apple’s annual shareholders meeting in Cupertino, to show off the very first Macintosh personal computer in a live demonstration. Macintosh 128 came bundled with what was later called the Mac OS, but then known simply as the System Software (or System).

The original System Software was partially based on the Lisa OS, previously released by Apple for the Lisa computer in 1983, and both OS were directly inspired by Xerox Alto. It is known, that Steve Jobs and a number of Apple engineers visited Xerox PARC (in exchange for Apple stock options) in December 1979, to see Alto’s WYSIWYG concept and the mouse-driven graphical user interface, three months after the Lisa and Macintosh projects had begun. The final Lisa and Macintosh operating systems upgraded the concepts of Xerox Alto with menubars, pop-up menus, and drag-and-drop action.

The primary software architect of the Mac OS was Andy Hertzfeld (in the nearby photo, he is standing in the middle). He coded much of the original Mac ROM, the kernel, the Macintosh Toolbox, and some of the desktop accessories. The icons of the operating system were designed by Susan Kare (the only woman in the nearby photo). Macintosh system utilities and Macintosh Finder were coded by Bruce Horn and Steve Capps. Bill Atkinson (the man with the mustache in the nearby photo) was the creator of the ground-breaking MacPaint application, as well as QuickDraw, the fundamental toolbox that the Mac used for graphics. Atkinson also designed and implemented HyperCard, the first popular hypermedia system.

Andrew (Andy) Jay Hertzfeld was born on 6 April 1953 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Brown University with a computer science degree in 1975, and was a graduate student in computer science at UC Berkeley in January 1978, when he purchased one of the first Apple IIs. He went on to write articles for several journals and soon came to the attention of Apple Computer, and was hired as a systems programmer in August 1979.

Just like his direct rival, the IBM PC, Mac used a system ROM for the key OS code. However, IBM PC used only 8 kB of ROM for its power-on self-test (POST) and basic input/output system (BIOS), while the Mac ROM was significantly larger (64 kB) because it contained both low-level and high-level code. The low-level code was for hardware initialization, diagnostics, drivers, etc. The higher-level Toolbox was a collection of software routines meant for use by applications, quite like a shared library. Toolbox functionality included the following: management of dialog boxes; fonts, icons, pull-down menus, scroll bars, and windows; event handling; text entry and editing; arithmetic and logical operations.

The first version of the Mac OS (the System Software, which resided on a single 400KB floppy disk) was easily distinguished from other operating systems then because it does not use a command line interface—it was one of the first operating systems to use an entirely graphical user interface or GUI. Additional to the ROM and system kernel is the Finder, an application used for file management, which also displays the Desktop. The two files were contained in a folder labeled System Folder, which contained other resource files, like a printer driver, needed to interact with the System Software.

The first releases were single-user, single-tasking (only running one application at a time), though special application shells could work around this to some extent. They used a flat file system called Macintosh File System (MFS), and all files were stored in a single directory. The Finder provided virtual folders that could be used to organize files in a hierarchical view with nested folders, but these were not visible from any other application and did not actually exist in the file system.

In June 1978, Seymour Ivan Rubenstein, director of marketing for IMS Associates Inc. (a California-based computer manufacturer, which designed the IMSAI computer), left the company with $8500 in cash and established his own software company, named MicroPro International Inc, one of the first software companies. Soon he hired another IMSAI employee, the system programmer John Robbins (Rob) Barnaby, to write an editor and a sorting program for data processing.

Seymour Rubenstein was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in 1934. His father was a Russian Jew, who emigrated to America in 1918. His mother was born in the USA to a Russian/Romanian emigrant family. Seymour got BSc and Master’s degrees from City College of New York and was engaged in repairing televisions and technical writing before starting at Sanders Associates as a programmer of IBM 1620 in the early 1960s.

Rob Barnaby aimed for a scientific career by entering Harvard College in 1961, but eventually realized he was an engineer, not a scientist, by personality. During his senior year, he stumbled onto computer programming, which became his employment career. Barnaby got his B.A. degree in Physics in 1966 and started in Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he worked until 1971, when he moved from Cambridge MA to California.

Barnaby already had an experience in the area of text processing, as while at IMSAI, he wrote a screen editor (called NED, New EDitor), so within a few months, in late September 1978, the commission of Rubenstein was fulfilled. The editor was called WordMaster, and the sorting program was called SuperSort. The programs were created on IMSAI PCS 80/30 computer (see the nearby image) with the IMDOS operating system (a version of CP/M OS) and were entirely written in the assembly language of Intel 8080.

WordMaster was a simple text editor with no print formatting capabilities and completed with a formatting program called TexWriter, which formed MicroPro’s main sales until April 1979. Following the completion of WordMaster and SuperSort, in October 1978 Rob Barnaby set to work on Rubinstein’s new word processor that was to become WordStar. The idea for WordStar Rubinstein got when he studied the Datapro reports, which discussed the abilities of contemporary standalone word processors from Lanier, IBM, Xerox, Wang, and others, and he asked Barnaby to enhance WordMaster with similar features.

Barnaby recalled later: Seymour was the marketing brains—it was he that said we should address word processing to get a larger market. The defining change was to add margins and word wrap. Additional changes included getting rid of command mode and adding a print function. I was the technical brains—I figured out how to do it, and did it, and documented it. The product’s success I think related both to it being the right product (Seymour) and to it being a fairly good implementation given the equipment (me).

Barnaby needed four months to code Wordstar on his IMSAI PCS 80/30 computer. This was done in assembler for Intel 8080 from scratch (according to Rubenstein Barnaby was the mad genius of assembly language coding), as Barnaby wrote 137000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Only some 10 percent of Wordmaster code was used.

In June 1979, MicroPro began selling the product under the name WordStar. The price was $495 (and $25 for the manual), and by early 1980, MicroPro announced that 5000 people had purchased WordStar in eight months, a very good marketing success for the time. Wordstar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and WYSIWYG. It was the first editor with dynamic pagination and even help levels among other new features.

Barnaby had been working extremely long hours and was burnt out. He stopped direct work on the program, first acting as an advisor and then taking a long overdue holiday. Finally, he left MicroPro in March 1980 but returned for several weeks again sometime later, when Rubenstein asked him to write a customized ROM version of WordStar for the first portable computer of Epson, PX-8.

Wordstar soon became a true blockbuster. It dominated the market in the early and mid-1980s, succeeding the market leader Electric Pencil. In 1979 MicroPro did half a million USD in sales, which jumped to $1.8 million in 1980, and to $5.2 million in 1981. Then the company ported the product for CP/M-86 and PC-DOS (Jim Fox, Barnaby’s assistant, ported WordStar to MS/PC DOS) and released it for the IBM PC in April 1982 and sales sky-rocketed to $23 million, to reach $45 million in 1983. In 1984, just as the company was going public, the sales were up to $70 million, and users of Wordstar were over 1 million. Micropro became the biggest software company in the USA.

Interestingly, in the late 1980s, Rubinstein was sued by Bill Millard, former CEO of IMSAI, regarding the theft of trade secrets regarding WordStar, but Rubinstein managed to defend himself successfully. Rubenstein later developed a spreadsheet product called Surpass, which became the famous Quattro Pro.

In 1975, Michael Shrayer, a 41 years old semi-retired filmmaker from New York, moved to California. Enjoying assembling electronic kits, there he purchased and assembled a MITS Altair 8800 computer kit after seeing the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. He later expanded his Altair with a paper punch, video display, and keyboard and he began writing machine language programs.

In the fall of 1975 at one of the early meetings of the Southern California Computer Society, a guest at the meeting had a special present for the attendees, including Shrayer. Bob Marsh offered up a copy of Processor Technology’s public-domain software package called Software Package One. It was a collection of programmers’ programs—tools to make writing and modifying programs easier. Shrayer started to program, using this package, but he was not fully satisfied with the editor portion of the software package and thought he could come up with something better. Thus he made some improvements to it and named his improved version Extended Software Package 1 or ESP-1.

Fellow computer hobbyists at the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California, wanted to buy Shrayer’s ESP-1 software, giving him an unexpected and lucrative new business. Shrayer had to write documentation, but he didn’t want to use a typewriter but his Altair instead. There were no suitable programs available, so he decided to write his own, called Electric Pencil. At that time, he didn’t even know that a product like Pencil was called a word processor. In fact, Electric Pencil was the first word processor ever written for a microcomputer. By Christmas 1976, after nearly a year of work, Shrayer’s Electric Pencil was ready, written in assembly language. The original version required only 8K of memory and an Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80 processor, and had a powerful impact, influencing almost all word processors that followed it.

The new Electric Pencil program (see the Operator’s Manual) was unlike anything else available, and there was a great demand for the program. Shrayer began selling it through his company, Michael Shrayer Software, Inc. People wanted versions for computers other than the Altair, and 78 different versions were created for different computers and operating systems (like Sol-20, and TRS-80) by 1980.

The Electric Pencil advertisements promised a number of features:
Write text, delete, insert, or move words, lines, paragraphs, save text on tape (or disk), then print formatted copy with our TRS232 or Centronics printer (RS-232C with disk version). Right justification, page titling and numbering, transparent cursor and repeating keyboard. Upper case only, or lower case with modification.

Electric Pencil II was released in 1978, but was only available for CP/M and (later) Model II TRSDOS. It was considerably more expensive, at $325 for the Model II TRSDOS version and $275 for the CP/M version. Version I (as the original Electric Pencil was now named) remained available for other computers.

In January 1981, IJG Computer Services, Harvard Pennington’s company, took over the distribution of Electric Pencil from Michael Shrayer Software. IJG released a new version in February 1982. Electric Pencil remained on the market into the middle 1980s, including a version for the IBM PC in 1983.

Biography of Michael Shrayer

Interestingly, very little is known about Michael Shrayer. He was born on 31 July 1934. From the middle 1950s, he lived in New York, where he used to work as a cameraman, producer, and director of television commercials and films, including several French pictures directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, like Magnet of Doom (1963) with Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Two Men in Manhattan (1959). At one time Shrayer worked as a cameraman for the TV show Candid Camera.

When in 1975 Shrayer moved to California, he was “semi-retired”. There he started programming and developed the pioneering word processor Electric Pencil. The name was a haphazard effort that came to him in the middle of the night, as his wife Deborah came up with one of the words and he came up with the other. Shrayer was an active programmer until the early 1980s when he gradually withdrew from the business. “I never think commercially,” said Shrayer. “The biggest success I had was Electric Pencil because I did it for myself.”

Shrayer had a ham radio license, and he had studied firearms. Michael Shrayer died at age 72 years old on 19 October 2006 in Arlington, Tarrant County, Texas.

The first smartphone in the world—IBM Simon Personal Communicator—was announced at the COMDEX computer and technology trade show in Las Vegas, on 16 November 1992. The device was code-named “Sweetspot”, and after the very successful prototype demonstration at COMDEX, IBM began work on the commercial product, code-named “Angler”. Although the term smartphone was not coined until 1997, Simon’s features and capabilities (see the Users Manual of IBM Simon) of a handheld, touchscreen cellular phone and PDA in one device can be referred to as a smartphone.

The originator of the idea for the IBM Simon was Frank Canova, IBM’s lead architect, and inventor (see the nearby image). With advances in MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) technology enabling smaller integrated circuit chips and the proliferation of wireless mobile networks, Canova realized that chip-and-wireless technology was becoming small enough to use in handheld devices. The day after Sweetspot’s debut, USA Today featured a photo on the front page of the Money section showing Canova holding the Sweetspot prototype.

Francis James Canova Jr. was born on 23 December 1956 in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1978 he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology. After his successful career at IBM, Canova joined Palm Inc. in January 1997 where he was head of engineering for the PalmPilot, Palm III, V, and VII series of PDAs and successor devices. Later he held senior engineering positions at Amazon Web Services, Coherent, Inc., Plastic Logic, Neato Robotics, Livescribe, Reactrix Systems, Wheels of Zeus, and Cirrus Logic. Canova is the author of over 50 issued patents, has filed for dozens of others, and holds the title “Most Prolific Palm Inventor”.

The announced in 1992 device was patented on 16 July 1996 (see US pat. Nr. 5537608), with a priority date of 13 November 1992. It allowed a user to make telephone calls, as well as to work with facsimiles, emails, and cellular pages. It also demonstrated other digital services such as maps, stocks, and news before they were widely available, among other functions. IBM Simon featured 11 built-in programs, including a calendar, to-do list, calculator, address book, appointment scheduler, world time clock, electronic notepad/sketch pad, handwritten annotations, and standard and predictive stylus input screen keyboards.

Simon (dimensions: 200 mm, 64 mm, 38 mm; weight 510 g) featured a Vadem 16 MHz, 16-bit, x86-compatible CPU. The memory was 1 MB of ROM (read-only memory) and 1 MB of PSRAM (pseudo-static random-access memory). The connectivity was provided by a 2400-bps Hayes-compatible modem.

Simon used the operating system Datalight ROM-DOS. IBM created a unique touch-screen user interface for Simon’s 114×36 mm, 160x293px monochrome backlit LCD display. Optional was a PCMCIA pager card designed by Motorola, an RS-232 adapter cable for use with PC-Link to access files from a personal computer, and an RJ11 adapter cable to allow voice and data calls to be made over POTS land-lines.

Simon’s included NiCad battery lasted about eight hours in standby mode and about one hour under constant use.

Simon was assembled under contract by Mitsubishi Electric and was distributed by BellSouth Cellular between August 1994 and February 1995, as some 50000 units were sold. BellSouth initially offered Simon throughout its 15-state service area for US$899 with a two-year service contract or US$1099 without a contract.