MSP92 [] ’57 & Life: Innovation & Independence

As Malaysia celebrates its 62nd year of independence, MSP looks at some of the milestones in technology and science since 1957.


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EPISODE EXCERPT

With his authoritarian nature we’re not entirely sure it was a good idea to ask Matt to put together a list of tech and science advances and breakthroughs to celebrate the 62 years since Malaysian Independence. But MSP is a show that takes risks. And Matt has promised to keep today’s content WHO compliant. Unlike many of his business ventures.

How are we going to do this? Chronologically?
I thought that that would be a bit boring.
As riveting as listening to me reciting a list of facts for 25 minutes would be, I thought jumping about might make it a bit more interesting.
Because it’s also about looking at the way those discoveries are interconnected.
How one breakthrough leads to another.
And how they might appear to be unrelated.

Which means you have to give us an example…
Happy to.
For the benefit of the listeners, I asked Jeff and a few other people to share some of their favourite moments in tech history over the last 60 or so years.
One of the things that came up on both our lists was Photoshop.
The image processing and manipulation software released by Adobe back in 1990.
Can you imagine? Photoshop is almost 30 years old.
I guess we’ll have to dedicate an MSP Ikons show to it at some point.

Obviously, we’re celebrating it as a breakthrough, but isn’t Photoshop one of those love to hate it inclusions?
Yes, of course.
I think most of the big software breakthroughs - including milestones like Microsoft Word and the Office Suite - are very much in the love hate category.
And designers have horror stories about early versions of Photoshop.
Many of which are more about the state of computing back in the 90s.
Buggy machines that would hang.
Graphics cards and processors that couldn’t handle the load.
Slow data transfer and rendering speeds.
The number of times I used to get stuck in the office because a page of a magazine was crashing the zip drive.
It used to take hours to download things.

Yet Photoshop is still a transformational tool?
Yes. For all its complexity.
It helped to transform desktop publishing.
We’re talking media industries. Fashion. Advertising.
It made it possible to easily manipulate photos. Colour correct them.
Give them a distinct look and feel.
That’s a legacy that we carry over into products like Instagram and its photo filters.
We take it for granted, but to do what Instagram does with the click of a button, used to take many minutes if not hours on early versions of Photoshop.
And those same tricks could take a designer days to do manually with physical photos and negatives.
All those clean looking social media posts against lily white walls. We owe those to Photoshop.