Dan Silva

Dan Silva Biography by "trsrehntrs" (from http://amiga.emugaming.com/dansilva.html)

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.