Back in the days of Eniac in 1948, one was lucky to be able to arithmetic calculations using 0s and 1s. By the early-1970s, users would see a blank screen with a blinking cursor, and had to know what to do, or else there could be an incredible corruption of software. By the early to mid-1980s graphics technology was available to users in the form of Commodore Amigas and the McIntosh. Commodore used special characters, called “sprites” and McIntosh had the reputation of being the best graphics tool around. In fact Adobe developed Photoshop originally for the Apple. By the early 1990s, the World Wide Web (WWW) was coming on line, and viewers had the “luxury” of seeing animated ads. Crude they were, but they literally illustrated not only the existing capabilities of a computer but foretold amazing possibilities. Through the years progress continued until we have now available a full suite of applications that allow developers not only to create and edit graphics (including photographs and movies) but enable some of those capabilities through phones and laptops.
When graphics were emerging code had to be laboriously written. There was a tedious process of using “peeks” and “pokes” to control the computer’s memory. For example, you had to write a program that might look something like:
10 poke 2530,77
20 for i=0 to 88:read a:poke 7932+i,a:next i
This is beginner’s all-purpose symbolic instruction code, otherwise known to more prosaic users as “BASIC”. Make one mistake – even a single character – and your effort would blow up.
The advent of windows applications enabled a user simply to move icons around to get applications to run. However, a lot more was in the waiting until today, we have Adobe that takes up more memory that a whole houseful of computers has back in the old days.
Currently, there is Creative Suite Version 5.5, shortened as “CS5.5”. This was released 3 Maym2011. There is a standard “text engine” that allows one to create any print in any form on the word, just like a word processor. That is, one can do desktop publishing, anything and even more than a regular book publisher could do, only, of course, electronically. This means a web creator can do just about anything with graphics and text. Anything you can do in “hard mode” you can do on CS5.5 but more. You can create animations without knowledge of programming or Flash, for that matter. Any part of a still object can be animated and at different speeds. Flash in CS5.5 actually writes code automatically with application, such as replacing video in a display. A CS5.5 can collaborate across the internet with other in creating a web page.
When Adobe refers to a “multiscreen environment (http://tv.adobe.com/show/flash-professional-cs5-feature-tour/ ), they do not leave out the good old television. Couch potatoes in the future will interact with what they see, made possible by CS5.5. While this is not common now, the applications are making their way through the pipeline.
Adobe software has become so elaborate that one has to take special training or even college courses to access the full capabilities of CS5.5. One need only to think back not too long ago in the “code” or “flashing cursor” days to imagine what it would take to implement the entire CS5.5 feature and this is assuming that the hardware technology would be available. This involves hundreds of millions of lines of code, not too different from what we saw back in the old Commodore days. Kids don’t know how lucky they or what the “good old days” were like when one actually had to know how to operate a computer and write code. Now, it is “point and click”.
