Painting with Light

The Quantel Paintbox was one of the first computer systems designed to create and manipulate digital graphics in a manner that was much closer to painting and drawing than computer programming. The technology was launched in 1981, and was essentially Photoshop ten years before Adobe Inc. announced its own image-editing system. Rather like the Fairlight CMI, being a pioneer had its disadvantages for Quantel, one of them being the enormous expense of the Paintbox system. Photoshop was never really cheap if you were buying it new but it was still only a software package; with the Fairlight and the Paintbox you also had to buy the computer and all the peripherals that ran the software. Consequently, Paintbox systems were mostly used by TV studios for on-screen graphics during throughout the 1980s, although Quantel also created a parallel system for print graphics which was used for image processing and photo collaging until Macintosh and Adobe started to dominate design studios. David…