What was before JPEG? #pcx #shorts – YouTube
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/08
I feel old, because I vividly remember the PCX (1985) graphics file format: it was the defacto standard under DOS.
TIFF (1986) was slightly younger, and came from the scanner background resulting in very large files though unlike PCX (which had lossless compression), TIFF supported both lossless and lossy compression.
On Windows and OS/2, you had BMP (1985, lossless initially only black and white).
All three suffered from the same problems: different implementations causing all sorts of compatibility problems
Those were the reason for the implementation of newer file formats for graphics like JPG (1992, lossy) and PNG (1996, lossless).
[Wayback/Archive] What was before JPEG? #pcx #shorts – YouTube – @Vitaskhr
--jeroen






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