Adobe, capitalized, is the name by which Adobe Systems Incorporated, a company dedicated to software development, is known. This company was created in California (United States) in 1982.
Adobe’s software for editing photos, videos, and websites are very popular around the world. Adobe also created widely used formats in computing, such as the Portable Document Format (PDF).
According to Digopaul, one of the best known Adobe programs is Adobe Photoshop. This image editor is used by a large number of newspapers and magazines to retouch the photos they publish, eliminating imperfections and optimizing quality. With Adobe Photoshop it is possible to erase a person’s wrinkles or lighten a recorded landscape on a day with poor visibility, for example.
Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Flash, Adobe PageMaker and Adobe Reader are other computer programs created or purchased by Adobe that have millions of users.
When adobe is written with a lowercase initial, the term is a common noun that refers to a dough made of clay and straw. This mass is molded in the manner of a brick and, once it has been dried, it can be used to build different structures.
The use of adobe in construction dates back several millennia BC. In the Peruvian soil, there is a city created in pre-Columbian times that was built with adobe: Chan Chan. This place is part of the world heritage of the UNESCO since 1986.
In the same way, we cannot ignore the fact that there are other series of constructions that were also made with adobe and that have become a benchmark for this or other reasons. Specifically, among them, the following stand out:
-The city of Catalhöyük (Anatolia), which dates from the 7th century BC and was considered to have had all the houses built with the aforementioned material.
-In Ancient Egypt we cannot forget that there were many buildings and construction elements that stood up using that element. This would be the case, for example, of numerous mastabas.
-The city of Caral (3,000 – 1,800 BC) was also built with adobe. It is considered to be the oldest known settlement in Latin America.
If adobe has been used as a building material for centuries, it was due to the set of advantages that it brings. Specifically, among the most notable are that it is a very economical material, which makes it possible to achieve walls of considerable thickness and even exerts great power as an insulator, both thermal and acoustic. That without overlooking either that its production process is really simple.
On the other hand, the most anti-adobe aspects are that it requires that the surface on which the construction is erected is not wet and that the process to obtain the adobe requires time, especially drying.
