![]() ![]() PCX, is one of the two formats utilized by Microsoft Paint during its early-’90s glory days. First developed for Microsoft Windows and OS/2 in the late ’80s, the format is generally highly capable of high-color image displays, and, along with. This file format is effectively Microsoft’s most notable gift to the world of image standards. “The format basically remained unchanged since its specification was released in 1985, but many extensions to the format have been created and documented by a great many software developers, making IFF one of the most utilized formats of today,” the 1996 book stated. While it was mostly used for sound and image data on the PC according to the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats, it played more fundamental roles as a general purpose file format on the groundbreaking Amiga.Īs the Archive Team notes, the Amiga’s quirks cut both ways, leading to numerous variations on the IFF format that were designed to work with specific types of applications or were specially coded to work with the Amiga’s quirky hardware design. This Amiga-centric file format, created by Electronic Arts in the 1980s for its popular DeluxePaint program, saw leaps in innovation that quickly made the efforts by PC Paintbrush seem a bit old hat. It’s not mainstream anymore, even if it lives on in some specific use cases. ![]() Of the formats listed here, TIFF is probably the one most likely to still be in wide use, but it has evolved into a more specialized format for professionals, in comparison to something like JPG. “Desktop publishers and scanner manufacturers prefer TIFF because it offers portability between the Mac and the PC, reducing the time it takes to bring products to market for both systems,” PC Magazine writer Tom Stanton wrote of the format’s appeal in a 1987 article. It came at an important time as well, as it helped to standardize the industry’s needs around scanners at a pivotal time for the field. Aldus was quick to standardize the format, and when Adobe purchased the company in 1994, Adobe continued to maintain the standard. ![]() A tag-based file format, it came into wide use in large part because PageMaker was the publishing industry’s tool of choice in the industry’s early days. This file format came to fruition during the mid-1980s, when the desktop publishing craze was coming into focus, and is a creation of Aldus, the developers of the groundbreaking PageMaker, with help from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. There is a degree of compression going on with this format, but it’s not particularly effective a focus on compression would not emerge until later formats such as GIF and JPEG. The reason for that? The format was specifically tied to the graphical capabilities of the IBM PC-which meant it was built around CGA, EGA, and VGA, according to the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats(yes, a real book!). MSP files were 1-bit quality and generally were out of date by the early ’90s.) The version of Paint in Windows 3.0, the first version of Windows many people actually used, could only open-not save-MSP files. MSP format, which was specific to Microsoft Paint’s early versions, and is so obscure that it was actually deprecated by Microsoft before most people had a chance to use it. ![]() (There was also a third format, the quickly forgotten. PCX faded out of view as higher-resolution raster formats became more common, it nonetheless was one of the most dominant image formats on the IBM PC during the late 1980s. (As mentioned above, Microsoft literally white-labeled a version of PC Paintbrush to give us Microsoft Paint.) While. PCX format was associated with PC Paintbrush, a hugely popular program in the days before Windows, so much so that it became a de facto standard for image editing in the days before GIF and JPEG. Microsoft was so concerned about the company that made PCPaint, Mouse Systems, that the MS-DOS maker licensed software from its largest competitor to make a drawing app of its own. The format is notable in the history of drawing programs, despite its hackneyed nature, because the approach was used with PCPaint, the very first drawing app for the IBM PC that used a mouse and a graphical interface. Because of BSAVE’s widespread use, early digitizer tools such as the VersaWriter drawing board relied on BSAVE to store screen-drawn graphics that could be re-displayed later. This works in many versions of Microsoft BASIC, the closest thing that there was to a truly cross-platform application during the early years of the personal computer industry. (To load the image, of course, you use BLOAD.) This isn’t really a distinct format so much as a way to save a raw image of what’s on the screen using the BSAVE command offered in various versions of Microsoft QuickBasic. This format has a more direct lineage with the IBM PC. ![]()
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