Image Manipulation Program spawned GTK, which begat GNOME
The General Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, has turned 25. A brief celebration post details how the package started life as a July 1995 Usenet thought bubble by then-student Peter Mattis, who posted the following to several newsgroups: Four months later, Mattis and fellow University of California Berkeley student Spencer Kimball delivered what they described as software “designed to provide an intuitive graphical interface to a variety of image editing operations.” The software ran on Linux 1.2.13, Solaris 2.4, HPUX 9.05 and SGI IRIX. The answer to the file format support question turned out to be GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and XPM. The rest is history. Richard Stallman gave Mattis and Kimball permission to change the “General” in its name to “GNU”, reflecting its open source status.
