What year was each Illustrator tool and feature originally added to the program

[Luisa27821256zx9f]

I'm doing a graphic design infographic project where I've picked 100 tools and features of Illustrator and I need several categories of data for each one. One of these categories is the year each one was originally added to the program but I can't find this information almost anywhere online, there's a Wiki page with some dates but then I found a PDF from adobe that had features added from 2012-2022 that had slightly different dates. Either the version of Illustrator or the year, I need some kind of specific time that most tools/features were added. Does anyone have a source of where this information could be found?

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

You would have to dig that out for each feature. The PDF you are probably referring to takes its list from the official "What's new" list of things. There is some more in a list originally compiled by Rufus Deuchler that I have translated into German here: https://www.vektorgarten.de/neue-funktionen.html

And for the rest of the functionality maybe the German Illustrator Wikipedia page: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Illustrator

If you find discrepancies, then maybe post to this thread and ask specifically. And probably there will be someone who has used the version and can tell you exactly what was there.

When posting, please don't make text smaller. It's close to illegible. Thank you.

[Luisa27821256zx9f]

Thank you so much for your reply, I didn't know that there was a German Wikipedia that differs from the English one this is extremely helpful!

My phone must have made the text smaller without me realizing that wasn't the default, oops! Thanks again!

[Ton Frederiks]

When Illustrator was 25 years, I made an interactive app and collected this information.

Version      Year     Codename

Adobe® Illustrator® 1.1 1987 Picasso

Adobe® Illustrator® 1.1 shipped on March 19, 1987, it was the first software application for Adobe, that until then, only had 2 products; Adobe PostScript® printing technology and  PostScript Type 1 fonts. All Tools introduced in this version are still available 25 years later: Selection, Hand, Zoom, Pen, Type, Rectangle, Ellipse, Scissors, Scale, Rotate, Reflect, Shear and Page Tool.

Adobe® Illustrator® 88 1988 Pinnacle*

Color support (preview in color on color monitors and print to colorprinters), Pantone colors library, Placed Images (EPSF), Auto Trace Tool, Freehand Tool, Measure Tool, Patterns, Shape Blends, Adobe Separator for color separations and Adobe Collectors Edition with clip art and patterns.

*unconfirmed

Adobe® Illustrator® 3 1990 Pegasus

Adobe Type Manager (ATM) to display PostScript Type1 fonts on screen at any size (until then only installed Bitmap fonts were used for preview), Type directly on the document, Text along a path, Text in and around arbitrary shapes, Charts and Graphs Design.

Adobe® Illustrator® 4 1992 Desert Moose (4.1 Kangaroose)

Windows 95 version, Grids, Edit in Preview.

Adobe® Illustrator® 5 1993 Saturn

Adobe® Illustrator® 5.5 1994 Janus

Layers, Edit in preview on Mac.

Adobe® Illustrator® 6 1996 Popeye

TrueType support, Gradients, Eye dropper, Paint bucket, Plug-ins

Adobe® Illustrator® 7 1997 Simba

Adobe UI, Tabbed and Dockable Palettes, Transform Palette, Align Palette, Photoshop Pixel Filters, Rasterize, Punk, Bloat, Free Distort, Layout Grid, Vertical Type Tools, JCK support, Multiple Masters Instance Creation, Smooth Shading Gradient Blends, Linked Images, RGB color support, ICC Color Management, Separations Preview, Web-safe colors, Image Maps, GIF89a export.

Adobe® Illustrator® 8 1998 Elvis

Pencil tool, Bounding Box Handles, Smart Guides, Actions Palette, Bitmap Eyedropper, Gradient Mesh, Live Brushes, Live Blends, Links Palette.

Adobe® Illustrator® 9 2000 Matisse

Appearance Palette, Live Effects, Graphic Styles, Transparency, Drop Shadows, Feathering, Opacity and Layer Mask, Native PDF support, Auto-Trace, Release to Layers, Pixel Preview, Flash and SVG output.

Adobe® Illustrator® 10 2001 Paloma

Live Pathfinder Shapes, Symbols, Symbol Sprayer Tools, Slicing, CSS layer support, ODBC data link, Variables Palette, Save for Web, Liquify Tools (Warp, Twirl, Pucker, Bloat, Scallop, Crystallyze and Wrinkle), Envelopes (Warp, Mesh, Top object), Grid Tools (Line, Arc, Polar), Magic Wand and the Famous Flare tool. 

Adobe® Illustrator® (11) CS 2003 Pangaea (Sprinkles for CS)

3D effect, Isolation Mode, OpenType support, Character & Paragraph Styles, Columns & Rows, Optical Kerning, Optical Margins, Every-Line Composer, Custom Tab Leaders, WYSIWYG Font Menu, Japanese Type Support, Path Type Option, Template File Format, Scribble effect, Save for Microsoft Office.

Adobe® Illustrator® (12) CS2 2005 Zodiac

Live Trace, Live Paint, Colorized Grayscale Images, Photoshop Layer Support, Expanded Stroke Options, Control Palette, Adobe Bridge Support, Extended Wacom Tablet Support, SVG-t Export, PDF/X Export

Adobe® Illustrator® (13) CS3 2007 Jason

Live Color (Recolor Artwork, Color Harmonies), Color Guide, Flash integration, Eraser tool, Document Profiles, Crop Area, Improved Isolation Mode, Align Points.

Adobe® Illustrator® (14) CS4 2008 Sonnet

Multiple Artboards, Transparency in Gradients, Blob Brush, Live Gradient Editing, Separations Preview, Editing and Preview controls in the Appearance Palette.

Adobe® Illustrator® (15) CS5 2010 Ajanta

Perspective Drawing Tools, Variable-Width Strokes, Variable Opacity in Gradient Meshes, Spot Colors in Gradient Meshes, Shape builder tool, Bristle Brush (simulates real life brush strokes in vector format).

Adobe® Illustrator® (16) CS6 2012 Ellora

Adobe Mercury Performance System, 64-bit Memory Support, New Customizable User interface, gradient on a stroke, pattern creator tool, Improved ImageTrace (replaces LiveTrace), Gaussian Blur speed enhancements.

[Ton Frederiks]

You can see that interactive page here:

https://indd.adobe.com/view/42ea2169-ed7f-4b0f-bb48-84352ef4ba83

[Luisa27821256zx9f]

This is so helpful and well put together, very much appreciated!

Now I'm only missing specifics for:

(Convert)Anchor Point

Distribute

Expand

Export

Flip Horizontally/Vertically

Inverse selection

Maintain proportions

Paintbrush

Star

Swap Fill & Stroke

Swatch Library

[Alastair L]

Hats off to you Tom. I used all these back to AI v3 but mostly started out on AI 5. I was in a DTP shop for advertising (rivers of gold in those days) and the big monocromatic monitors and AI 5.5 was quite slow in Preview mode (as opposed to Outline/Wireframe mode which we still needed back then) and one of our senior designers use to fly down from Sydney to Melbounre to train us idiots and he still used AI 3 al day long just bc it was that much faster on the high end Macs we had. Never heard the version nicknames at the time. Who came up with "Jason"? was it Jason and the Argonauts? 

[Ton Frederiks]

Thanks Alastar, I don't know if the product teams still use code names for new versions or that they stopped doing that. Just like easter eggs and secret splash screens. The first Illustrator version had another name (besides Picasso) that did not make it; Artifactory. This is an early demo file made with Picasso in december 1986.

[Kurt Gold]

Ton, I didn't know it was Illustrator that reinvented Punk in 1997.

[Ton Frederiks]

Yes and there was also a Hippy filter.

[Kurt Gold]

Right, Ton, the Hippie filters. I still miss them sometimes.

[Ton Frederiks]

Can't remember Photo Crosshatch, but do the weird Hatch Effects.

[Kurt Gold]

Photo Crosshatch was pretty useful to prepare copperplate-like experiments.

And I think the Hatch effects weren't weird at all (well, the procedure certainly was). They could do things which are still requested until today.

[westdr1dw]

Not sure if you are still looking for this information. This type of information is usually in a ChangeLog. However, I do not think Adobe publishes this information. Would be nice to be able to track down to the tool level. You may already know how to translate the page Monika provides the link to below. If not and you use Chrome the link should show up in the upper right corner.