When did Illustrator first make available the "template" feature, enabling the user to draw on/over a dimmed background?

[Guest]

This is a historical question. I recently told someone that I started using Illustrator before I ever used Photoshop because Illustrator came out a year or two before Photoshop did, available only for Mac, and only in black and white. I think most of that is correct, but I'm still uncertain about one point: If AI came out first, before PS was available, then when was the "template"feature first available? Was it added after 1988, or was it there in Illustrator from the outset? IF it was there from the outset, how did the artist get an image into the computer to work from? With no Photoshop and no scanners? Or am I wrong about those details? Note that I'm not asking about Auto-trace and Streamline, the tracing function, but about the template layer, which is still unique to Illustrator.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Wow..sorry, I stand corrected! I wonder what I was remembering then. Maybe it was the way the clone tool functioned. I just remember being disappointed it wasn't what you could do in ColorStudio. As far as the colour, I definitely screwed up there, but what ColorStudio could do that PS couldn't in its first version was work in CMYK. I think that came in PS 2.0, but now I can't trust my memory!! I do remember creating my very first Mac-based colour separations from ColorStudio.

[Ton Frederiks]

Yes, Color Studio could display CMYK files.

Photoshop 1.0 could make CMYK separations from RGB files, but display only the separate channels.

So you could create CMYK documents, but editing them was difficult.