In spring of 1987, just a few months after Rasband had gotten the Mac II computer, copies of the NIH Image program were handed out on floppy disks to anyone who asked. NIH Image was also promoted on the Mac forum on the CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service) electronic bulletin boards and was available on several Mac bulletin board systems. Rasband wanted to create a general-purpose extensible image analysis program that could be used by anyone who wanted to capture, display and enhance images and never targeted a specific biological application or type of imaging such as microscopy. His goal was to let the users drive the applications for NIH Image. Rasband continued to develop the program but through innovative concepts such as mailing lists, free reusable code, plugins and macros he also encouraged the users to develop their own code to address their own application needs. Medical researchers were some of the first users of the program as autoradiographs, CAT or PET scans and X-rays could be viewed, analyzed and notated. As NIH Image became increasingly used in many fields—biological microscopy being the largest—the functionality of the program and application base grew.
