IT Trivia: Nov 30, 2021

Here’s a review of this week’s questions:

1. What was the original name of Adobe Photoshop?
2. What was the QR code used for when it was first invented in 1994?
3. In what year was the first GIF developed?

And here are the answers:

1. Answer: ImagePro. Created in 1987, Photoshop was originally written on the Macintosh Plus of PhD student Thomas Knoll who wanted to display grayscale images on a monochrome screen. The earliest version of the software was thus called “Display” but was soon renamed to “ImagePro” after Knoll took a six-month break from his studies and enlisted the aid of his brother to develop the product into a fully functional image-editing program. The name “ImagePro” was taken, however, and Thomas ultimately settled on “”
2. Answer: Track vehicles during assembly. While they are ubiquitous now, Quick Response or QR codes have only been around since 1994, when they were invented by Masahiro Hara from the Japanese company Denso Wave. The initial design was influenced by the black and white pieces on a Go board. Its purpose was to track vehicles during manufacturing; it was designed to allow high-speed component scanning.
3. Answer: CompuServe employee Steve Wilhite, who insistedat the 2013 Webby Award show that the format was always intended to be pronounced as “Jif” with a soft “G” as an attempt to play on the branding of American peanut butter brand Jif — a gimmick that went as far as CompuServe workers saying “choosy developers choose GIF.” Wilhite and his team found a way to use a compression algorithm combined with image parameters like the number of available colors. His new creation could be used for exchange images between computers, and he called it Graphics Interchange Format. The GIF was born.