I found this paragraph from Stephen Johnson's new book interesting.
The very high resolution 1-gigabyte panoramics could not even be opened in Photoshop when we started to make them. On my second panoramic outing in late 1995, I stumbled onto a width limit in Photoshop; it wouldn't open an image beyond 30,000 pixels. The new panoramics were up to 65,000 pixels long. I kept making them anyway, knowing that eventually this problem would be solved. I couldn't resist these very detailed records of the scene. In 2003, this limit was overcome and I can now open these files and make good use of them.