Like litte mud huts...

Adobe's In Design, Photoshop, and rat bastard wayward child, Illustrator.

Ah, the Adobe creative suite. if you do pretty much anything with creating graphics, layouts, or design, there's a good chance you've used an Adobe product at one time, or another. Or, in some cases, yelled at it in late night fits of last minute deadlines and homework.

Or, is it just me?

Anyway, Adobe was founded in 1982 by by John Warnock and Charles Geschke; who left Xerox in order to develop their Postscript page description language. After Postscript, they went on to market fonts which they released in a proprietary format called, simply enough, Type 1; a single byte font format which eventually went public. eventually Type 1 would fall to Apple's True Type font.

In the mid 80's - during the great video game and garage start up age - Adobe threw their hat into the graphics creating ring with Illustrator, to compete with Apple's QuickDraw. Illustrator used a Bezier curve, which gave greater accuracy to shape rendering and allowed for greater scalability.

However, in 1989, Adobe released probably their greatest achievement; they gave the world Photoshop. And, with that, ushered in a new golden age for amateur and professional  photographers the world over. And, of course, it wouldn't take us comic book folks long to figure out how to put it to good use, either.

Adobe, which takes its name from the Adobe Creek in Los Altos, Ca - which ran behind Warnock and Geschke's house, has been responsible for many standards in graphic and interactive design, as well as web standards, like the Portable Document Format (PDF) and Acrobat reader. And, even though making a few mistakes in trying to predict the trends in persona and business computing, as managed to stay both profitable and relevant in the field of graphic and interactive design. Slowly, over the years, they've been able to buy out and absorb other competitors in their respective fields to become the giant they are, today.

Today their product line includes layout software, like In Design, replacing PageMaker, and acquired Macromedia in 2005; expanding their reach into video production with Premiere, Director, and other editing programs.

Today, based out of San Jose, Ca (With offices also in San Francisco.), Adobe controls the lion's share of the graphic software and design market. They have grown from a mere handful of fonts into the main power behind desk top publishing and marketing; as well as small and large studio house production, and have a net worth of close to $9bil.