Tedium - Open To Conversion 🖼

Today in Tedium: Around this time 30 years ago, two separate working groups were putting the finishing touches on technical standards that would come to reshape the way people observed the world. One technical standard reshaped the way that people used an important piece of office equipment at the time: the fax machine. The other would basically reshape just about everything else, becoming the de facto way that high-quality images and low-quality memes alike are shared on the internet and in professional settings. They took two divergent paths, but they came from the same place: The world of compression standards. The average person has no idea what JBIG, the compression standard most fax machines use, is—but they’ve most assuredly heard about JPEG, which was first publicly released in 1992. The JPEG format is awesome and culture-defining, but this is Tedium, and I am of course more interested in the no-name formats of the world. Today’s Tedium discusses 10 image formats that time forgot. Hope you have the right conversion tool. — Ernie @ Tedium

A sample of PC Paintbrush in action; a variant of this application became Microsoft Paint.

3. .PCX File Format

File type: Raster image

Most common file extension: .PCX

If you used Microsoft Paint (then known as Paintbrush) with Windows 3.0 circa 1990, you’re probably aware that it could save files in two formats. The PCX format was one, and at the time of Paint’s release, it was by far the most common of the two.

The reason was simple: The .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. (As mentioned above, Microsoft literally white-labeled a version of PC Paintbrush to give us Microsoft Paint.) While .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.

(There was also a third format, the quickly forgotten .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. 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 MSP files were 1-bit quality and generally were out of date by the early ’90s.)

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!). 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.

An ad for the Truevision Targa system during the period AT&T owned it. (via Internet Archive)*

6. Truevision TGA (TARGA)

File type: Raster image

Most common file extension: .TGA

The IFF format may have become closely associated with the hardware needs of the Amiga, but TGA was literally a byproduct of some of the earliest dedicated video hardware for the IBM PC. Originally developed by AT&T and spun off into its own company in the late 1980s, TGA was one of the first file formats capable of “true color” with the help of its hardware-based image-processing tools. As the Library of Congress notes, it was even capable of transparency effects, a big deal for its time.

“Truevision went on to pioneer the desktop digital video editing industry with the introduction of the Targa videographics card in 1987 that would run in a PC,” the IEEE Computer Society wrote of Truevision’s efforts. “In that same year, NewTek announced its Amiga-based video capture board, the Video Toaster, but didn’t actually release it until 1990, so Targa truly was the first.”

While not as common today as some other image formats, it does have its use cases in 2021—Valve, for example, uses a variation of the Targa file format, .VTF, to store images in Steam.

Examples of VRML graphics from the ’90s. Admittedly, they would not have looked nearly this good in 1995—our graphics technology quickly superseded it.

9. Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)

File type: Vector graphics, animation, interactive

Most common file extension: .WRL, .WRZ

If you’ve been rolling your eyes at all the sudden talk about the metaverse, you should just know that we’ve been going down this general road for at least a quarter-century. VRML, an early 3D-graphics format, was one of the first image formats developed specifically for the web (as well as one of the first developed with standards in mind, rather than a corporate product retrofitted for the purpose), and its hype was actually very similar to the metaverse chatter Mark Zuckerberg and company have been throwing at us in recent weeks. Both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator natively supported the format in their software in the late ’90s.

The hype around this format was breathless, with lots of media coverage in the mainstream press (rather than just the trade press, though there was that, too), despite the fact that few people actually had the chance to use it. There is probably a discussion to be had about the fact that an open standard for digital graphics lost out to the proprietary Flash, but VRML seems like a great thing to revisit given the fact that a company we should all be calling Facebook seems to be drawing attention to the same basic idea.