Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/September 18

Today in 1992 the first JPEG standard was published. It allows perceptually nearly indistinguishable reproductions of natural images at a fraction of the uncompressed size of the original, while the degree of compression can also be increased until the image impression falls apart. This well-engineered open standard is ancestor to almost all following popular lossy (moving) image compression algorithms, having all their main building blocks already in place. For still images, it proved difficult to improve on. It is an example of particularly long-lived, so-called “golden formats” that are especially well suited for long-term archival. While the standard specifies additional features, only those not encumbered by patents got widely implemented. Nevertheless, even the patent status of the core technology had to be defended in court.