As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

In my last Stories from the Past post, I chased an opossum through the labyrinthine interior of a graphics and prepress shop at one o’clock in the morning. This story dates back to the same era, and a little company called Adobe.

First, a bit of background. The shop where I worked had two scanners. I don’t mean scanners like flatbed scanners bolted to the top of a printer. No, these were old magic, enormous drum scanners from the day when a computer filled a room.

Behold, the Linotype-Hell Chromagraph CP341, still to this day the best scanner ever made. See that glass cylinder? You’d tape the thing you were scanning to it. The drum would spin at high speed while a type of sensor called a “photomultiplier tube” scanned across its surface.

These are big, expensive, and require incredible training to operate, but they produced images better than modern flatbed scanners: higher in both resolution and dynamic range.

Anyway, we were doing a job for the New York City metro service, an advertising poster that would hang in the New York subway. Most advertising billboards are designed to be seen from far away, so they’re incredibly low resolution, usually around14 pixels per inch. This poster was intended for people to be able to walk up nose-to-nose with, so it was at traditional press resolution, 300 pixels per inch, making the scan of the image that would be the background of the poster over a gigabyte in size.

Photoshop 3.0 had just come out. Photoshop 3.0 was a huge step forward for Photoshop, but this was a simpler era, when a single file a gigabyte in size was something almost unheard of.

So I open the file, which takes half an our over a 10base-2 Ethernet network, and start to work. Photoshop pops up an error: “Sorry, a program error occurred” and dies.

I spend another half an hour opening the file. Same thing.

So I call Adobe, because of course the shop had top-tier Adobe tech support, the kind that costs the price of a small car every year and lets you jump to the head of the queue when you call.

I explain the problem. “How big is the image?” they said.

“A gigabyte,” I said.

“You mean a megabyte?”

“No, a gigabyte. With a G.”

Long silence.

“How did you get an image that big?”

“Scanning a 4×5 positive on a Hell Chromagraph 341 drum scanner for an advertising poster.”

“…oh.”

They eventually put me directly on the phone with an actual developer, who told me they’d never imagined anyone editing a file that size. A later update fixed the issue, but for years after, when I called Adobe tech support and gave them my support number, they’d say “oh, you’re the guy with the gigabyte file! We have your support call hanging up on the wall!”