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The GIMP Turns 25 Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

24 November 2020

Twenty-five years ago last Saturday, Peter Mattis wrote a message to several newsgroups, the hashtags of the era, announcing a new image editor called GIMP, short for General Image Manipulation Program.

Happy 25th Birthday GIMP! Illustration by Aryeom.

"The GIMP is designed to provide an intuitive graphical interface to a variety of image editing operations," he wrote.

As Simon Sharwood pointed out in The GIMP Turns 25 and Promises to Carry on Being the FOSS Not-Photoshop yesterday, "As Mattis and [Spencer] Kimball worked to create GIMP, they also spawned the GTK GUI-creation toolkit, which was necessary to evolve the GIMP but ended up becoming a piece of code probably more influential than GIMP itself."

Matthis and Kimball were both students at the University of California at Berkeley 25 years ago.

Oh, and FOSS for those of you from the app generation, stands for Free and Open Source Software. Not only is the software free but the code is available for anyone to monkey with.

In This Is 25 on the GIMP site, Wilber reports:

We don't really have any kind of big news for you to commemorate the anniversary. Sorry about that. We keep slaving away -- in a more intelligent way these days, hopefully. But there might be cake.

Let them eat cake, we say, hoisting our glass.


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