I’d say that it was a little excessive to say that the BMP file format “didn’t make it” when it was the only raster image format that the Windows OS natively supported for years, and is still supported by Firefox and Chrome out of the box. The WMF file format would have been a more interesting item to use there instead.
The article lists formats that were (and are) in widespread use, where most people reading the article probably interacted with more than half. That’s fairly successful.
The real point is that we have faster CPUs than in the 80s, with more ability to compress; we have more bits per pixel and more pixels which increases the benefit of compression; and we moved to networks that are frequently bandwidth constrained. Hence, formats today are more compressed than formats in the late 80s/early 90s. That doesn’t mean they failed, it just means tradeoffs change.
Same goes for IFF ILBM on the Amiga; it was the only picture format for graphics of 256 colours or less, making it the universal format.
For that matter, TIFF was still the only way we handled photos when I worked in publishing; it can handle CMYK and its only real contender is Photoshop’s internal format.
Yeah but I also think it’s fair to say that IFF ILBM ‘didn’t make it’. Sure, it was the lingua franca for images at the time but it only ever truly took off on the Amiga, and although those of us who were Of the Tribe may feel like The One True Platform was the most important thing EVER in the HISTORY COMPUTING, if we’re honest with ourselves - it wasn’t :)
Sure I mean the whole idea is an exercise in futility. There are always going to be unhappy NERRRDS grousing about how their Xerox INTERLISP 4 bit image format got left out :)
I get it but I also think everyone is young once and sadly a necessary aspect of that and the concomitant dearth of life experience that helps you scope your opinions against commonly perceived reality means we all get a pass and rightly deserve it :)
It’s the folks who NEVER grow out of this that are sadly crippled and deserve our pity, and maybe where appropriate our help.
Although I remember setting a JPEG as my Workbench backdrop and it would take several minutes before it would display after startup on my 1200, until I downloaded a 68020-optimized (maybe 030/FPU optimized? I got an upgrade at some point) data type from Aminet and it would display after only a second or so.
I mean yes but Datatypes were so much cooler. Also I think I had a good reason at the time, but I don’t remember what.
I do remember downloading an MP3 (Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen”) and trying to play it on my 1200. The machine simply was not fast enough to decode the MP3 in real time, so I converted it to uncompressed 8SVX…it played just fine but took up an enormous portion of my 40MB hard drive.
I have a vague feeling that .AVI, which was for a while extremely prevalent container for video content, is some derivation from IFF (but not perhaps ILBM).
WMF is a walking security vulnerability. One of the opcodes is literally “execute the code at this offset in the file” and there were dozens of parsing vulns on top of that.
It doesn’t get a mention here but the first one that comes to my mind is MNG which is a PNG based variant to do much the same as animated GIFs. I was rather dismayed how several years after I thought we’d finally killed the GIF format, it seemed to make something of a comeback.
Ah, PCX… with its terrible RLE compression, that takes me back. Also from the equally unwieldy FLI animation files that Deluxe Paint would spit out. Back when it was something we rarely ever managed to see, 24-bit colour modes were always known to my friends and I as “Targa Truecolor” mode.
Random factoid: doom screenshots are originally in PCX format with RLE but they borked the RLE algorithm and wrote out Unnecessarily large files which also happened to be the wrong aspect ratio (320x200 uncorrected to 4:3). For chocolate doom we decided to fix the aspect for PNG screenshots. Some research concluded that sadly almost nothing supported the PNG aspect ratio flags so we instead scaled the buffer up an integer multiple in both dimensions: 5 in one and 6 the other and wrote out 1600x1200 sized PNGs. they were still a fraction of the PCX file size.
I’d say that it was a little excessive to say that the BMP file format “didn’t make it” when it was the only raster image format that the Windows OS natively supported for years, and is still supported by Firefox and Chrome out of the box. The WMF file format would have been a more interesting item to use there instead.
Most screenshots I get from customers at $work are in .BMP. Still very much out there.
You’re lucky! I’m still amazed at the number of people who send screenshots in Word documents or even Excel workbooks.
I get those, sometimes also converted to a PDF to be more professional.
It’s just a terrible headline.
The article lists formats that were (and are) in widespread use, where most people reading the article probably interacted with more than half. That’s fairly successful.
The real point is that we have faster CPUs than in the 80s, with more ability to compress; we have more bits per pixel and more pixels which increases the benefit of compression; and we moved to networks that are frequently bandwidth constrained. Hence, formats today are more compressed than formats in the late 80s/early 90s. That doesn’t mean they failed, it just means tradeoffs change.
Yeah. Three I had never heard of, two I knew by name and 5 have used from sometimes to often.
But if the definition is “it’s not PNG, JPEG, GIF, or SVG”, then yes, they didn’t make it.
Same goes for IFF ILBM on the Amiga; it was the only picture format for graphics of 256 colours or less, making it the universal format.
For that matter, TIFF was still the only way we handled photos when I worked in publishing; it can handle CMYK and its only real contender is Photoshop’s internal format.
Yeah but I also think it’s fair to say that IFF ILBM ‘didn’t make it’. Sure, it was the lingua franca for images at the time but it only ever truly took off on the Amiga, and although those of us who were Of the Tribe may feel like The One True Platform was the most important thing EVER in the HISTORY COMPUTING, if we’re honest with ourselves - it wasn’t :)
#include <intuition.h> FOR-EVER! :)
RIFF, a little-endian variant of IFF, lives on in WAV, AVI, WEBP, and other formats.
Well, at least it was included, unlike XPM/PPM or Degas Elite, but I still think this was mostly a tendentious listicle.
Sure I mean the whole idea is an exercise in futility. There are always going to be unhappy NERRRDS grousing about how their Xerox INTERLISP 4 bit image format got left out :)
…I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
I get it but I also think everyone is young once and sadly a necessary aspect of that and the concomitant dearth of life experience that helps you scope your opinions against commonly perceived reality means we all get a pass and rightly deserve it :)
It’s the folks who NEVER grow out of this that are sadly crippled and deserve our pity, and maybe where appropriate our help.
3.x’s Datatypes were so awesome, though.
Although I remember setting a JPEG as my Workbench backdrop and it would take several minutes before it would display after startup on my 1200, until I downloaded a 68020-optimized (maybe 030/FPU optimized? I got an upgrade at some point) data type from Aminet and it would display after only a second or so.
Good times.
Or convert to ILBM. You only need to do it once, then it loads instantly :)
I mean yes but Datatypes were so much cooler. Also I think I had a good reason at the time, but I don’t remember what.
I do remember downloading an MP3 (Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen”) and trying to play it on my 1200. The machine simply was not fast enough to decode the MP3 in real time, so I converted it to uncompressed 8SVX…it played just fine but took up an enormous portion of my 40MB hard drive.
With accelerator boards, mp3 (and vorbis, and opus) are feasible. From a quick search, apparently a 68040/40MHz will handle mp3@320.
And, back then, mp2 was still popular and used less resources.
I have a vague feeling that .AVI, which was for a while extremely prevalent container for video content, is some derivation from IFF (but not perhaps ILBM).
WMF is a walking security vulnerability. One of the opcodes is literally “execute the code at this offset in the file” and there were dozens of parsing vulns on top of that.
It doesn’t get a mention here but the first one that comes to my mind is MNG which is a PNG based variant to do much the same as animated GIFs. I was rather dismayed how several years after I thought we’d finally killed the GIF format, it seemed to make something of a comeback.
We’ll never kill GIF in that, to most people, any short video is a GIF.
Ah, PCX… with its terrible RLE compression, that takes me back. Also from the equally unwieldy FLI animation files that Deluxe Paint would spit out. Back when it was something we rarely ever managed to see, 24-bit colour modes were always known to my friends and I as “Targa Truecolor” mode.
Random factoid: doom screenshots are originally in PCX format with RLE but they borked the RLE algorithm and wrote out Unnecessarily large files which also happened to be the wrong aspect ratio (320x200 uncorrected to 4:3). For chocolate doom we decided to fix the aspect for PNG screenshots. Some research concluded that sadly almost nothing supported the PNG aspect ratio flags so we instead scaled the buffer up an integer multiple in both dimensions: 5 in one and 6 the other and wrote out 1600x1200 sized PNGs. they were still a fraction of the PCX file size.
No love for Netpbm and its associated file formats?
That video on the BMP section was autoplaying with sound and scared the hack out of me.
I remember TGA as the image format that POVRay used. Good times. <3