Dan Silva Biography by "trsrehntrs"
Dan's interest began in the early 60's when he was working towards
his Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford
University. At that time he had no idea that the computer would one
day become a tool for self-expression and creativity.
He began to realize that the potential existed during his 4 years
with Informatics, a contractor to the NASA Ames laboratory. Like
many computer programming pioneers, Dan did his most interesting
work after hours, when computers would otherwise have been idle.
In 1978 he started working for the Xerox Star system, it was
there that he realized that he could make a living having fun with
computers. There followed a year at the newly formed Lucasfilm
designing a video editor, and then back to Xerox, where he worked
with Bill Bowman creating a next generation bitmap editor. This
effort produced Doodle, a black and white paint program running on
the Xerox Dandelion computer.
By the time Dan joined Electronic Arts in 1983, he had a clear
idea of how the ideal paint program should behave. With this in
mind, he started work on Prism, a paint program that was to be an
in-house tool for software development.
As Prism grew, so did its market-place potential, especially
with advent of Commodore's Amiga and it's thirst for powerful
software.
Deluxe Paint was released in November, 1985, and became an
instant success, achieving greater than 50% market penetration
among all Amiga owners. Dan started to work almost immediately on
Deluxe Paint II. Software development schedules being what they
are, he had to wait until he started to work on the second version
before adding the features he had wanted to include in the
first.
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