Soviet Image Editing Tool From 1987 146
nacturation writes "Three years before Photoshop 1.0 was released, computer engineers in the USSR were already retouching photographs using some surprisingly advanced technology. A video shows how the Soviets went about restoring damaged images with the help of rotary scanners, magnetic tape, and trackballs. No word on whether this technology was used to fake moon landings or put missiles in Cuba." Photo manipulation in the USSR (and elsewhere) had a pretty good jump on computers, though.
BT, DT (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure I was cutting and pasting and cropping and rotating images on uVAXen a couple of years before this.
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I'm pretty sure I was cutting and pasting and cropping and rotating images on uVAXen a couple of years before this.
So you are outing yourself as part of the conspiracy?
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If his account was on kgbvax, then yes :-).
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Deluxe Paint preceded Photoshop 1.0 by 5 years...
What about Quantel? (Score:5, Informative)
Quantel Paintbox beats them both, it was first launched in 1981!
Quantel sued two companies, one of them being Adobe but didn't win the Adobe case, largely due to the existance of Superpaint, who's author testified in the case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpaint [wikipedia.org]
Re:BT, DT (Score:5, Funny)
I don't believe it. Next you will try to tell me that Microsoft did not invent spreadsheets word-processors and windowing OSes.
In fact it is French PERICOLOR-1000 Software (Score:5, Informative)
One of the Russian comments points out that the software is in fact French PERICOLOR-1000 translated to Russian.
Re:In fact it is French PERICOLOR-1000 Software (Score:4, Interesting)
Didn't the Russians pretty much steal everything computer-related from the Western countries at that time?
The most famous software product from Russia, Tetris, was originally developed on a russian-made DEC PDP-11 clone.
I also remember reading that pretty much all their mainframes were IBM OS-3xx clones.
I'm sure they had sufficient skilled engineers in Russia to do it themselves, but why pay somebody to invent it, if you don't have to respect copyrights and patents and can just steal it?
Re:In fact it is French PERICOLOR-1000 Software (Score:5, Interesting)
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It was more complex.
Russia had its own pretty advanced computer technology till 70-s. BESM ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BESM [wikipedia.org] ) computers were on par with Western Bloc models and there were original developments like Setun' computer with ternary arithmetic ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun [wikipedia.org] ).
Then came a 'bright' idea to partner with IBM. USSR actually paid for licenses for IBM hardware (IBM software was probably free at that time) so it was not pure piracy.
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You know, command economy has no natural feedback and very skewed competition.
Which is why they were so technologially backward, and why the US was the first country to get a man into space. Wait...
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Perhaps they could be first on the Moon without all the infighting, though... (a lot of people in "the West" don't realize how bitter the competition could be in the USSR, and how far taken - one lead designer simply refused to supply the engines needed by N1 to be successful; or - how many people heard about TKS spacecraft? You know, their other manned program, concurrent with Soyuz...)
Re:In fact it is French PERICOLOR-1000 Software (Score:5, Funny)
Well we stole Tetris and made billions on it, so it all worked out in the end.
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I'm sure they had sufficient skilled engineers in Russia to do it themselves, but why pay somebody to invent it, if you don't have to respect copyrights and patents and can just steal it?
So in slashdot terms, the USSR was in fact a pioneer in overthrowing the old-fashioned concept of intellectual property?
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Not quite (your post comes out slightly ironic with the mention of Tetris, especially considering how it was copied without licensing; and don't forget the USSR was generally embargoed in the first place).
Their mainframes of that time (not all / there were earlier lines) were compatible with IBM ones, yes (apparently the planners wanted "the standard"). But, as was done also by Hitachi or Siemens, they were reverse engineered, with quite original hardware; and later versions of OS also heavily modified. Dur
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I was doing astronomical image analysis on photographic negatives in 1985. Images were scanned using a (monochrome) photodensitometer attached to a PDP 11 and manipulated on a VAX 11-750 with a Grinnell display (512x512x8, IIRC). Nothing would have prevented you from doing most basic Photoshop type manipulations, and developing your own routines to do image manipulation was far easier than doing so for Photoshop is right now.
By 1987, megapixel 8-bit displays would have been common in astronomy. By 198
the real story (Score:5, Funny)
The real story is that the Soviets had clip art collections that made their job easier. This was years before clip-art was widely used in the West.
People doctoring photos could choose from the "Still Popular Heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution" as well as "Accepted Images of our Beloved Leaders: Lenin through Gorbachev".
What was little known at the time is that if you bought both sets, you would also get a free set "Communist Leaders of the world". This set had flattering pictures of Chaiman Mao, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera.
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Collect 'em all!
Collect 'em all! (Score:5, Funny)
Before they collect you.
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Time-Life Clip Art?
I would assume the Chinese had the lead in that (Score:2)
Re:I would assume the Chinese had the lead in that (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, OTOH full-blooded autocracy might not even really need such methods all that much, vs. places where the "voice of people" supposedly matters.
(really, it might have been almost a sport; coming from a place formerly behind the Iron Curtain, I'm pretty sure people were treating anything coming from the Party with a grain of salt anyway)
Re:I would assume the Chinese had the lead in that (Score:5, Funny)
The Chinese have the lead in a lot of things. And cadmium as well.
Stalin was having people edited out for years... (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd be written in and out of the "history" books.
Zinoviev died, and was written out.
Trotski was murdered in Mexico, and was written out.
Hundreds and thousands were written out of existence, their tombstones chiseled clean.
That was one of the points in 1984.
Control the books and you control the history of a people. Winston Smith job was working as a "redactor", part of the problem, even as he sought, and failed, to find a solution.
People who could recite the history of the lottery numbers chosen at what da
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You'd be written in and out of the "history" books.
Zinoviev died, and was written out.
Trotski was murdered in Mexico, and was written out.
Hundreds and thousands were written out of existence, their tombstones chiseled clean.
[citation needed]
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http://www.amazon.com/Commissar-Vanishes-Falsification-Photographs-Stalins/dp/B00007D037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1288900689&sr=8-1 [amazon.com]
The methods used by the Soviets to manipulate and control the information consumed by the populace is pretty widely understood, and I'm sure that need to maintain control drove the use of this relatively so
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Authoritarian tyrants are much the same whether their guise is communism, national socialism, or democracy. The best way to make people forget about enemies of the state is to not talk about them.
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It's actually quite easy to think of a better citation. The Gulag Archipelago is a work of fiction; Solzhenitsyn has in later life admitted that, especially in regards to the overall numbers, he had made things up. This is not denying reality of what the Soviet regime was up to in those years - simply that you don't want to use the Gulag Archipelago as your primary historical citation.
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"Citation needed" usually gets on my nerves, but in this case, I must say to you: WOOOSH!!
Tip: If you're able to provide documentation of a person or event being "written out of history", then they weren't written out of history.
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History is not about what actually happened, it's about what we think had happened.
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A fine tradition dating back all the way to the pharaohs and probably before even them. Still goes on too, albeit in a more restricted form. Eg. Texas removing Thomas Jefferson [aolnews.com] from textbooks. History is malleable and, more often than not, written by the powerful.
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And I'm not even joking. Aren't monochromatic regimes the obvious clients for such techniques?
there. Fixed that for you.
I would have been more impressed (Score:5, Insightful)
But they were doing this stuff with deluxe paint on an Amiga in 1985.
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There were also 24-bit/32-bit color paint systems like the Quantel paintbox, and Tempra as well.
Nifty (Score:1)
Its nice to see that someone besides the super geek was using image editing back then!
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Everybody was using it. With or without computers
If you open a 70-80-es soviet book on photography there is always a BIG chapter on touching up pictures. There is a reason for it - if you see the zombies in charge (Brezhnev, Suslov, etc) faces without retouching you would probably lose sleep for the next few days from recurring nightmares.
In Soviet Russia.... (Score:1)
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Same here, about half a page further than I thought. I guess we must not be new here :)
[Insert Obligatory Soviet Russia Joke Here] (Score:3, Funny)
Re:[Insert Obligatory Soviet Russia Joke Here] (Score:5, Funny)
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In Soviet Russia, photo edits you!
Obligatory Standard Joke (Score:2)
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Now the rest of you can concentrate on real, intelligent responses. Don't say I never took one for the team.
YMBNH
Er... yeah... and ? (Score:4, Informative)
Earlier in the late 70s and early 80s, people around the globe used Crossfield and Hell drum scanners to retouch photos. Yeahs before computers were able to do it.
I had pieces of a Hell drum scanner in my office in 1988 when I was building an image correction software to control it. By then, ImagePro had already been doing this for a couple of years, on computers.
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"Damaged" images. (Score:4, Insightful)
And they used it for "restoring damaged images". Yeah. Sure.
Images that were "damaged," for example, by having Trotsky [wikipedia.org] in them.
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Or Nikolai Yezhov [newseum.org].
Re:"Damaged" images. (Score:4, Insightful)
And they used it for "restoring damaged images". Yeah. Sure.
Images that were "damaged," for example, by having Trotsky [wikipedia.org] in them.
He has crazy eyes...
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He has crazy eyes...
Soviet image editink software works good, da?
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Images that were "damaged," for example, by having Trotsky [wikipedia.org] in them.
The same goes for pretty much every picture of Nixon that I have ever seen.
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The same goes for pretty much every picture of Nixon that I have ever seen.
They all had Trotsky in them?
This is nothing more than just a simple showcase (Score:1)
DHMO Connection (Score:4, Funny)
In Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
Wait a minute, at 1:11 is that Kip from Napoleon Dynamite??? [lollibrary.com]
Looks like the footage has been ... (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
There were grayscale image editing programs for Macintosh at that time, and color image editing software for mini computers even earlier.
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I am pretty sure I used color imaging software in 87... even in 86 (DeluxPaint/ImageFX/AdPro) and I definitely saw 24 bit editing on a preproduction/very early version of Mac II in late 1985... yes that steak was VERY juicy on that highres monitor.
Uncrop! (Score:2)
Soviets just bought western technology (Score:1)
OK, so the Soviets could by western hardware (Pericolor drum scanner and an Apple ///). Big deal.
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OK, so the Soviets could by western hardware (Pericolor drum scanner and an Apple ///). Big deal.
That's Yabloka Tre, you insensitive clodski.
from comments there (Score:5, Informative)
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Exactly. This is why I can speak Russian, in French. Stay thirsty my friends...
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It was reliable, you just had to drop it to reseat the chips [lowendmac.com] every now and then
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Focus On The S/w, Not The H/w (Score:2)
Granted, the equipment depicted looks to be a combo of imported (drum scanner), cloned (Apple II), Soviet (tape drive), and in-house (track ball) equipment.
However, I'm going to make a wild-ass guess that the Cyrillic interface photo-editing software was home grown, and that's the significant value-add to the system.
Photoshop 1.0 (Score:3, Funny)
There were image manipulation before Photoshop?
LIES!
That the verb for doing image manipulation is 'to photoshop' should be proof enough! I mean OMGz LOL If teh wordz is to photoshop, how could you photoshop, before photoshop 1.0? with the beta release???!!!111oenenoene
Seriously, kids, the shift of the millenium was not celebrated as the end of the stone age!
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Next you're going to tell me that people were podcasting before the iPod.
Murrr (Score:2)
SGI and the X Windows system (Score:2)
SGI and the X Windows system both existed in 1987.
And the editing tools included 3D modeling.
This is not state of the art in the day.
Although I can see how important Censorship of images in the Soviet Union would be in the day... Its all about the propaganda.
In soviet russia... (Score:2)
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Family of Greedo rejoices (Score:3, Funny)
Plus-good MiniTru-wise! (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be cheaper (Score:2, Funny)
Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to rent the same studio that NASA used?
Now that's for a responsive UI (Score:4, Interesting)
While the image repainting was slow simply due to memory bandwidths back then, one can't but be amazed at the instantaneous response from the right-hand menu system. It seems like it took one or two vsyncs for the new menu to appear in response to a keystroke. This is something that you still can't get on modern OSes simply because there's always the VM subsystem in the way. On OS X, working normally with few running applications and plenty of memory, I can get 100+ms lag when switching between menus. Sure, the median may be pretty good, but the worst case is annoying. It interferes with the workflow. Never mind the everpresent lag on the workspace of most applications, be it photo editing, spreadsheet, CAD, etc.
I think that VM paging-induced lags are something that can't be overcome as long as we keep programming like we do -- with the assumption of infinite memory, more or less. I would really like to see a gradual shift towards realtime scheduling and applications where at least the core code and data is permanently wired. In the days of CP/M, WordStar was dealing quite well with slow links between the CPU and the terminal: you could type while it was trying to refresh the menus and the workspace. In the worst case, if you typed really fast, it'd only paint the characters you typed and nothing else. The timing was done such that it took into account the terminal baudrate, so things suitably improved when you'd switch the baudrate to something faster (38400 was a big deal back then, many systems only supported 19200 and defaulted to 4800 or 9600bps).
These days there are plenty of applications where everything is unresponsive due to paging just a tiny part of the UI. You'd think that the hot path would be resident and responsive, and that the GUI systems would cope with multiple application threads all doing GUI operations. Alas, neither X11 nor winapi got that right, and I don't know offhand whether multithreaded UI operations are allowed by OS X. Heck, you'd think that message-based interthread/interprocess communications would enable one to queue messages in face of stalled threads (say disk I/O stalls), and let the core user experience stay on par with expectations circa 1980.
Paging is the sole killer of user experience in modern applications, and it's not easy to work around it in environments where only one thread in a process can paint on the screen.
Re:Now that's for a responsive UI (Score:4, Insightful)
While the image repainting was slow simply due to memory bandwidths back then, one can't but be amazed at the instantaneous response from the right-hand menu system. It seems like it took one or two vsyncs for the new menu to appear in response to a keystroke. This is something that you still can't get on modern OSes simply because there's always the VM subsystem in the way.
That's all very true, except that you're completely wrong. Seriously, what? I get those lags even on systems where I've temporarily disabled swap. I wholeheartedly agree that most X GUIs are painfully laggy - I hate that my 7MHz Amiga 1000 was much more responsive than my dual-core 3GHz desktop - but that has everything to do with the interactions between toolkits, X, and the apps using those toolkits and nothing at all to do with paging. And while you're at it, quit saying "VM" when you mean "paging". While you commonly see them together, they're nowhere near the same.
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Disabling swap doesn't disable paging. I don't know of any way of disabling page eviction to disk, not on Linux, not on Windows, not on OS X. That's what VM is about. You can have a process binary running, and only parts of its image will be in memory -- others are on disk, and the VM system will bring it in. The problem is that the VM is very bad at knowing what's the critical path and what are the priorities when it comes to page eviction. Any sort of hints given by the application are advisory, in the ma
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Disabling swap doesn't disable paging. I don't know of any way of disabling page eviction to disk, not on Linux, not on Windows, not on OS X. That's what VM is about.
That's not what VM is about, and I think you know it. Paging and swapping are things made possible by VM, but are not the same as VM.
But beyond that, there's an experiment you can run on many modern desktops: boot the whole system into a RAM disk and run exclusively off the motherboard DIMMs. No spinning rust, no SSDs, nothing but DRAM. Know what? You'll still see those latencies when clicking menus and other widgets.
I mentioned the Amiga deliberately in my last post. It had a wholly different GUI concept w
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I have been seen tests with DDR2-based ramdisks and running systems that don't use anything else: guess what -- CPU utilization bursts always reach 95%, and there's no latency to speak of.
An acquaintance has a Mac Pro with 6G of ram, that he runs off a 64 GB DDR2 ramdisk dedicated to the OS and Applications, data files are stored on a separate RAID. The machine feels unreal. Running a purpose-made memory hogging process, that would cause it to swap for 1-2 hours until OOM handler kicks in when run off a spi
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He said VM because he meant VM and not paging. Even when you've disable swap and have no paging, your address space for each application is still virtualized.
I have a Boston Terrier. As long as we're listing things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject, I thought I'd toss that out there.
Of course VM won't have any impact on human-observable latencies, so why even bring it up?
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VM has plenty of impact on human observable latencies since apart from memory protection there is no way to have VM without also having paging. And there's no way of killing paging that I know of. Swap -- sure, paging -- no. Even if it was possible to disable paging, it takes one clever programmer who decided it's OK to mmap gigabyte+ files, and you are out of memory in no time flat. With paging enabled, VM lets you do mmap while keeping wired number of pages reasonable, at the cost of uncontrolled latencie
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There is zero reason for this not to work like it should on a 2.5 year old MacBook with 4G of DDR2. You shouldn't need to have an SSD to have a modern paging VM system react 'instantaneously' to a human. We the people are slow. The fact that you can observe any sort of a UI latency at any point in time when running a modern OS is an abomination, and a statement of how lousy the widely used programming practices are. And I'm dead serious. Something is very, very wrong when a 100+ MHz CPU running a modern OS
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The reason for this is because with the latest OSes they have added many, many layers of abstraction. I've heard that Vista has at least 50 distinct layers. They also write most of this code in higher level languages.
What all this accomplishes is that it allows one to have a system that has orders of magnitude more complexity than those old OSes you remember and to be MORE stable with fewer noticeable bugs than the software of the old days. I remember both Mac OS and Win 3.1 would system crash all the ti
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It's not like the layers of abstraction change over time. The latency one experiences is random: it depends on what pages are in memory at the instant you try to do something, and perhaps to some extent on the locks held by code currently paged out due to memory pressure (if there's such a thing).
Basically, whatever is due to abstraction is the best case. If you can see that menus switch in 10ms, that's the best case, and to improve that you need to make the code more CPU-efficient. Everything else implies
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Actually when they rewrote Windows for Vista they added dozens more intermediate layers in the code.
An SSD and a ton of RAM mean that nothing is paged out to a mechanical hard drive.
For the record... (Score:2)
Translation Please? (Score:2)
Could someone who knows Russian kindly translate the voice over in the video?
But the true message is... (Score:2)
Removing people from photographs (Score:2)
No wonder they had advanced tools for retouching pictures. The Soviets were masters at removing officials from pictures (after they'd been thrown out of the party and/or sent to the gulags) almost from the beginning of their rule.
Examples here:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html [umn.edu]
Heh... Function follows need I guess.
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You'll get used to them. Back in the '30s I felt the same way about talkies.
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Won't let you see Much but main page if ad-block is on. acts suspicious with a modal dialog or click through you can't get rid off otherwise. Might just be bad site design, or might be worse.
It LOOKS like they're just trying to get add revenue for listing links to other peoples stuff, but it just sets off alarm bells when a site throws up a dialog box you can only turn off by clicking ONE of the two butt