Paint Shop was originally distributed as shareware and is still available at many download sites (4.12 being a popular version). It was released by Robert Voit in August 1990. Originally called simply Paint Shop, the first version, 1.0, was a basic picture converter between BMP, GIF and PCX formats, conceived by Robert Voit and developed by Joel DeRider. Paint Shop Pro 1.0 (pictured here running on Windows XP), was released in 1992 for Windows 3.1.