Then the art director rolled a cart into the bullpen. On it sat a chunky beige tower with a 14-inch CRT. "This," he said, tapping the screen, "is Micrografx Designer."

The art director blinked. "How?"

I remember the forum post that night. A user named VectorVet wrote: "Micrografx Designer didn't crash. It didn't corrupt files. It didn't ask for a subscription. It just drew perfect lines until you told it to stop. That's not software. That's a tool."

Six weeks later, the client wanted changes. "Make the cowcatcher pointier. Add a bell."

I was tasked with redrawing a 19th-century woodcut of a locomotive for a beer label—2,000 rivets, steam swirls, iron filigree. In FreeHand, my nodes would drift. In Illustrator, the file would bloat to 8MB and the print shop would laugh.

It will open tomorrow. It will open in ten years.

By 1997, the world had moved on. Macromedia was king. Adobe bought them. Corel tried to be a suite. Microsoft bought a piece of everything.