How did Adobe buy the rights to Photoshop?

Answer 1

Adobe bought the rights from the developers: Thomas & John Knoll. In 1987, Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a fully-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop. Later John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.