Many of our first memories of using the internet involve Nyan Cat. It offered lossless compression and better color capabilities and had an open format, without any copyright holders to collect royalties. But with a narrow color palette of 256 colors, the lack of transparent backgrounds, and pixellated renderings of complex images like photos, gifs had their limitations.Ī new file format - the Portable Networks Graphic, or png - came into prominence. When gifs were launched, their 24-bit RBG based colors were the norm for the technology of the time. Unisys made the business decision to collect licensing fees from those using gifs in commercial software and applications - and people were not happy.Ĭomputers and the internet were also getting better. In 1994, the patent holder of the LZW algorithm, Unisys, was no longer happy that their technology was being used for free. Gifs were the standard web developers used for still images, until they fell out of favor in the mid 1990s. It looks lofi by today’s standards, but at the time, it was a huge innovation. The first color image to appear on the web was of a pixelated airplane flying across an animated cloud background. The original iteration, otherwise known as gif87a, offered 8 bits per pixel and 256 indexed colors. The internet was slow, but we didn’t know any better.ĬompuServe wanted to offer their customers the capabilities to download full-color photos, but at file sizes that would be small enough so that it wouldn’t take hours.Ĭomputer scientist Steve Wilhite led a team at CompuServe in developing an image file format that would offer a full-color palette at more compressed file sizes.Īs a result, they developed the Graphics Interchange Format or gif, based on the LZW algorithm. These were the days of dial-up, where data transmission rates were limited by what phone lines could handle. In 1987, CompuServe was a major internet service provider. Though they’re no longer the preferred format for web images, due to their lower quality, and lack of accessibility, gifs still persist. Today, you’ll find png and jpg as the dominant file types. In the early days of the internet, gifs were the standard image format.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |