November 1995 - the first announcement of the beta launch of the "general image manipulation program", "The GIMP" (later renamed only "GIMP").
From: Peter Mattis Subject: ANNOUNCE: The GIMP Date: 1995-11-21 Message-ID: <48s543$r7b@agate.berkeley.edu> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.windows.x.apps The GIMP: the General Image Manipulation Program ------------------------------------------------ The GIMP is designed to provide an intuitive graphical interface to a variety of image editing operations. Here is a list of the GIMP's major features: Image viewing ------------- * Supports 8, 15, 16 and 24 bit color. * Ordered and Floyd-Steinberg dithering for 8 bit displays. * View images as rgb color, grayscale or indexed color. * Simultaneously edit multiple images. * Zoom and pan in real-time. * GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and XPM support. Image editing ------------- * Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent. * Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip. * Painting tools including bucket, brush, airbrush, clone, convolve, blend and text. * Effects filters (such as blur, edge detect). * Channel & color operations (such as add, composite, decompose). * Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters. * Multiple undo/redo. Requirements ------------ * The operating system must support shared memory. * X11 R5 or R6\. (Actually, it may work on R4, but we have not had a chance to test it). * The X-server must support the X shared memory extension. (The X-server does not actually need to support shared memory so this is only a temporary situation until we integrate the configure information with the source code). * Motif 1.2 or above. The GIMP has been tested (and developed) on the following operating systems: Linux 1.2.13, Solaris 2.4, HPUX 9.05, SGI IRIX. Currently, the biggest restriction to running the GIMP is the Motif requirement. We will release a statically linked binary for several systems soon (including Linux). URLs ---- http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~gimp ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/gimp mailto:gimp@soda.csua.berkeley.edu Brought to you by ----------------- Spencer Kimball (spencer@soda.csua.berkeley.edu) Peter Mattis (petm@soda.csua.berkeley.edu) NOTE ---- This software is currently a beta release. This means that we haven't implemented all of the features we think are required for a full, unqualified release. There are undoubtedly bugs we haven't found yet just waiting to surface given the right conditions. If you run across one of these, please send mail to gimp@soda.csua.berkeley.edu with precise details on how it can be reliably reproduced.
Much has changed since then. Here are some landmarks:
- They came with GTK - a set of interface tools used by GNOME and Xfce. GTK is now a standalone project used by thousands of developers.
- They brought a new image processing engine called GEGL, now used by several other software projects.
- They have a few debatable pseudonyms, such as "Photoshop for Linux", "Free Photoshop" and "that ugly software".