I’ve been a Photoshop user since the early 1990s.
My roommate at that time scraped together enough cash to buy a used Macintosh IIci. He owned this magnificent 40-by-60-inch drafting table, which he lowered completely flat to make room for the computer, monitor, scanner, printer, and a writhing nest of cables that snaked between them all.
Little did we realize how prescient that simple act would be: by leveling the table parallel to the floor, he was quietly signaling the end of an era. The surface would never tilt upward again for sketching, drafting, or any hands-on analog work. It would never serve as a drafting board ever again. From that day forward, it became nothing more than an expensive pedestal for very expensive beige boxes.
I played with Photoshop a bit on that machine — mostly filters and scanning drawings or photos — then saved the files to a floppy disk and carried them over to my far less glamorous (and much cheaper) Hewlett-Packard 386 PC.
They were all boxy and beige back then.
My roommate took a financial hit with the Mac that I thought was fatal at the time, but it paid off handsomely. Ad agencies, PR firms and large companies with design departments were stumbling into the digital age and would hire anyone who knew how to turn a computer on. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It was the Wild West, and my roommate rode in packing a digital six-shooter. He took to the throne quickly.
As the 1990s progressed, my roommate and I eventually parted ways. My freelance work at the time was still mostly analog cartooning, but my day job was in service bureaus. There I spent my days outputting customer files to film and proofs, opening QuarkXPress and Photoshop documents from customer disks, troubleshooting problems, and occasionally running quick scans or last-minute filters. It was just enough hands-on time with Photoshop to fall in love with the program — long before I ever owned a Mac of my own.
In 1997 I bought my own beige box: a Power Mac 7300, along with a full suite of desktop publishing software. The scanner I purchased came bundled with Photoshop.
Tina and I have been serious Photoshop users ever since.
Back in the twentieth century and early twenty-first, Photoshop still came on physical disks. I faithfully bought every upgrade until Adobe switched to Creative Suite bundles. I was perfectly happy with CS2, grudgingly jumped to CS3 when my PowerPC machine died and I had to go Intel, and stopped at CS4. Newer boxed versions kept coming with promises of must-have features, but I managed just fine without them.
I kept using my old boxed software even as Adobe began pushing the subscription model in 2011. It didn’t affect me at the time, so I ignored it.
Then in spring 2014, I subscribed to the basic $10-a-month plan for Photoshop and Lightroom. I can’t remember exactly why — probably because a new computer required a newer version. Either way, we were on the hook.
And once you’re on the hook for one subscription, the others follow: streaming services, razor blades, mystery boxes that show up at your door. Death by a thousand cuts.
Then it finally dawned on me.
I was already subscribing to the latest Photoshop, but whenever I needed Illustrator or InDesign, I simply fired up the old versions on my collection of ancient Macs. Those older programs still did everything I actually needed. In fact, most of my serious Photoshop freelance work had been done in versions ranging from 4.01 to CS4. They worked all right then. They work all right now.
If I was happily reverting to old software on old machines… why not just stick with the old machines entirely?
It took me twelve years, but the realization finally hit.
I’ve spent the last few months future-proofing my digital life with alternative operating systems and swapping in solid-state drives. I think I’ve finally nailed the perfect pairing — a relatively new Mac mini working in harmony with one that’s now 16 years old. I’ll write about that setup soon, once Tina and I have taken it for a proper test drive.
But first things first.
