The Amiga was built by some stoned dudes in a suburban garage, and it was on the market by 1985, the same year as Deluxe Paint debuted. Digital scanners of various types and prices predate this.
And uh don't throw stones. Some of NASA's photography is dubious, and occasionally outright impossible.
Cut NASA some slack, someone had to edit in those nuclear powered space lasers for America and take out the alien spacecraft that mug for cameras in every single space photo ever.
Lots of people bag on Eastern Europe and Russia. But the fact of the matter is that the US has had to lie about shit just to seem like we have our shit together as well as they do. Sure they drink each other under the table and love to fuck goats. But they were the first in space, and have the hottest women on the planet at their disposal. Old Soviet computers were the shit too.
I like what they're doing, I guess those were prints from broken glass negatives. It's hard to think it was unheard of to use a computer to fix pictures in 1987.
Amazing the big equipment required at the time. Even the scanner I got in 1997 for less than 0, including Photo Express software could do as well I'm sure. Somehow it seems that flatbed scanners for home use had been around a lot longer.
I'm assuming, because of my American education, that those computers and everything were paid for by the state, and that the man using would have probably been killed if he fucked it up. But what better way to make sure that an old lithograph get restored than to threaten the man with death?