1.
Electronic Arts
–
Electronic Arts Inc. is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Currently, EA develops and publishes games under several labels including EA Sports titles FIFA, Madden NFL, NHL, NCAA Football, NBA Live, and SSX. EA also owns and operates major gaming studios, EA Tiburon in Orlando, EA Canada in Burnaby, BioWare in Edmonton as well as Montreal, the company began developing games in-house and supported consoles by the early 1990s. EA later grew via acquisition of several successful developers, by the early 2000s, EA had become one of the worlds largest third-party publishers. In a note to employees, EA CEO John Riccitiello called this an important milestone for the company. EA began to move toward direct distribution of games and services with the acquisition of the popular online gaming site Pogo. com in 2001. In 2009, EA acquired the London-based social gaming startup Playfish, and in June 2011, EA launched Origin, there is also a On The House feature in Origin that lets you download full versions of EA games for free, it is updated regularly. In July 2011, EA announced that it had acquired PopCap Games, in February 1982, Trip Hawkins arranged a meeting with Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital to discuss financing his new venture, Amazin Software. Valentine encouraged Hawkins to leave Apple Inc. in which Hawkins served as Director of Product Marketing, on May 28,1982, Trip Hawkins incorporated and established the company with a personal investment of an estimated US$200,000. The company was not named Amazin Software, but instead Electronic Arts, seven months later in December 1982, Hawkins secured US$2 million of venture capital from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Sevin Rosen Funds. For more than seven months, Hawkins refined his Electronic Arts business plan, with aid from his first employee, Rich Melmon, the original plan was written, mostly by Hawkins, on an Apple II in Sequoia Capitals office in August 1982. The business plan was refined in September and reissued on October 8,1982. By November, employee headcount rose to 11, including Tim Mott, Bing Gordon, David Maynard, having outgrown the office space provided by Sequoia Capital, the company relocated to a San Mateo office that overlooked the San Francisco Airport landing path. Headcount rose rapidly in 1983, including Don Daglow, Richard Hilleman, Stewart Bonn, David Gardner and he recruited his original employees from Apple, Atari, Xerox PARC, and VisiCorp, and got Steve Wozniak to agree to sit on the board of directors. Hawkins was determined to sell directly to buyers, combined with the fact that Hawkins was pioneering new game brands, this made sales growth more challenging. Retailers wanted to buy known brands from existing distribution partners, after more flyers were handed out, former CEO Larry Probst arrived as VP of Sales in late 1984 and helped the company sustain growth into US$18 million in its third full year. This policy of dealing directly with retailers gave EA higher margins and better market awareness, in December 1986, David Gardner and Mark Lewkaspais moved to the UK to open a European headquarters. Up until that point publishing of Electronic Arts Games, and the conversion of many of their games to compact cassette versions in Europe was handled by Ariolasoft
2.
International standard
–
International standards are standards developed by international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use worldwide, the most prominent organization is the International Organization for Standardization. International standards may be used either by application or by a process of modifying an international standard to suit local conditions. Technical barriers arise when different groups together, each with a large user base. Establishing international standards is one way of preventing or overcoming this problem, the implementation of standards in industry and commerce became highly important with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the need for high-precision machine tools and interchangeable parts. Henry Maudslay developed the first industrially practical screw-cutting lathe in 1800, maudslays work, as well as the contributions of other engineers, accomplished a modest amount of industry standardization, some companies in-house standards spread a bit within their industries. Joseph Whitworths screw thread measurements were adopted as the first national standard by companies around the country in 1841 and it came to be known as the British Standard Whitworth, and was widely adopted in other countries. By the end of the 19th century differences in standards between companies were making trade increasingly difficult and strained, the Engineering Standards Committee was established in London in 1901 as the worlds first national standards body. After the First World War, similar national bodies were established in other countries, by the mid to late 19th century, efforts were being made to standardize electrical measurement. An important figure was R. E. B, Crompton, who became concerned by the large range of different standards and systems used by electrical engineering companies and scientists in the early 20th century. Many companies had entered the market in the 1890s and all chose their own settings for voltage, frequency, current, adjacent buildings would have totally incompatible electrical systems simply because they had been fitted out by different companies. Crompton could see the lack of efficiency in this system and began to consider proposals for a standard for electric engineering. In 1904, Crompton represented Britain at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis as part of a delegation by the Institute of Electrical Engineers. He presented a paper on standardisation, which was so well received that he was asked to look into the formation of a commission to oversee the process. By 1906 his work was complete and he drew up a permanent constitution for the first international standards organization, the body held its first meeting that year in London, with representatives from 14 countries. In honour of his contribution to electrical standardisation, Lord Kelvin was elected as the bodys first President, the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations was founded in 1926 with a broader remit to enhance international cooperation for all technical standards and specifications. The body was suspended in 1942 during World War II, after the war, ISA was approached by the recently formed United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee with a proposal to form a new global standards body. List of international common standards List of technical standard organisations Global Frameworks and standards organized along function lines, accessed 2014 ^ Cordova
3.
Amiga
–
The Amiga is a family of personal computers sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The Amiga provided a significant upgrade from earlier 8-bit home computers, the Amiga 1000 was officially released in July 1985, but a series of production problems meant it did not become widely available until early 1986. The best selling model, the Amiga 500, was introduced in 1987 and became one of the home computers of the late 1980s. The A3000, introduced in 1990, started the second generation of Amiga systems, followed by the A500+, finally, as the third generation, the A1200 and the A4000 were released in late 1992. The platform became particularly popular for gaming and programming demos and it also found a prominent role in the desktop video, video production, and show control business, leading to video editing systems such as the Video Toaster. The Amigas native ability to play back multiple digital sound samples made it a popular platform for early tracker music software. It was also an expensive alternative to the Apple Macintosh. Initially, the Amiga was developed alongside various Commodore PC clones, Commodore ultimately went bankrupt in April 1994 after the Amiga CD32 model failed in the marketplace. Since the demise of Commodore, various groups have marketed successors to the original Amiga line, including Genesi, Eyetech, ACube Systems Srl, likewise, AmigaOS has influenced replacements, clones and compatible systems such as MorphOS, AmigaOS4 and AROS. The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that almost nobody—including Commodores marketing department—could fully articulate what it was all about. Today, its obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound. Nine years later, vendors are still struggling to make systems that work like 1985 Amigas, Jay Miner joined Atari in the 1970s to develop custom integrated circuits, and led development of the Atari 2600s TIA. Almost as soon as its development was complete, the team developing a much more sophisticated set of chips, CTIA, ANTIC and POKEY. With the 8-bit lines launch in 1979, Miner again started looking at a next generation chipset, Miner wanted to start work with the new Motorola 68000, but management was only interested in another MOS6502 based system. Miner left the company, and the industry, shortly thereafter, in 1982, Larry Kaplan was approached by a number of investors who wanted to develop a new game platform. Kaplan hired Miner to run the side of the newly formed company. The system was code-named Lorraine in keeping with Miners policy of giving systems female names, in case the company presidents wife. When Kaplan left the late in 1982 to rejoin Atari, Miner was promoted to head engineer
4.
IBM PC compatible
–
IBM PC compatible computers are those similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, able to run the same software and support the same expansion cards as those. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones, Columbia Data Products built the first clone of the IBM personal computer by a clean room implementation of its BIOS. Early IBM PC compatibles used the computer bus as the original PC. The IBM AT compatible bus was named the Industry Standard Architecture bus by manufacturers of compatible computers. The term IBM PC compatible is now a historical description only, only the Apple Macintosh classic Mac OS and macOS kept significant market share without compatibility with the IBM personal computer, so consumers are typically identified as being a PC or Mac user. IBM decided in 1980 to market a low-cost single-user computer as quickly as possible in response to Apple Computers success in the microcomputer market. On 12 August 1981, the first IBM PC went on sale, there were three operating systems available for it. The least expensive and most popular was PC DOS made by Microsoft, in a crucial concession, IBMs agreement allowed Microsoft to sell its own version, MS-DOS, for non-IBM computers. The only component of the original PC architecture exclusive to IBM was the BIOS and this software would run on any machine using MS-DOS or PC-DOS. Software that directly addressed the hardware instead of making standard calls was faster, however, software addressing IBM PC hardware in this way would not run on MS-DOS machines with different hardware. The 808x computer marketplace rapidly excluded all machines which were not hardware-, the 640 KB barrier on conventional system memory available to MS-DOS is a legacy of that period, other non-clone machines, while subject to a limit, could exceed 640 kB. Rumors of lookalike, compatible computers, created without IBMs approval, by June 1983 PC Magazine defined PC clone as a computer accommodate the user who takes a disk home from an IBM PC, walks across the room, and plugs it into the foreign machine. Because of a shortage of IBM PCs that year, many customers purchased clones instead, Columbia Data Products produced the first computer more or less compatible to the IBM PC standard during June 1982, soon followed by Eagle Computer. Compaq announced its first IBM PC compatible in November 1982, the Compaq Portable, the Compaq was the first sewing machine-sized portable computer that was essentially 100% PC-compatible. The company could not copy the BIOS directly as a result of the decision in Apple v. Franklin. Each computer would have its own Original Equipment Manufacturer version of MS-DOS, any software written for MS-DOS would operate on any MS-DOS computer, despite variations in hardware design. This expectation seemed reasonable in the marketplace of the time. Until then Microsoft was based primarily on computer languages such as BASIC, the established small system operating software was CP/M from Digital Research which was in use both at the hobbyist level and by the more professional of those using microcomputers
5.
Bit plane
–
A bit plane of a digital discrete signal is a set of bits corresponding to a given bit position in each of the binary numbers representing the signal. For example, for 16-bit data representation there are 16 bit planes, the first bit plane contains the set of the most significant bit, thus, adding a bit plane gives a better approximation. If a bit on the nth bit plane on a dataset is set to 1, it contributes a value of 2. Therefore, bit planes can contribute half of the value of the previous bit plane, one aspect of using bit-planes is determining whether a bit-plane is random noise or contains significant information. One method for calculating this is compare each pixel to three adjacent pixels, and, if the pixel is the same as at least two of the three adjacent pixels, it is not noise. A noisy bit-plane will have 49% to 51% pixels that are noise, replacement of more significant bits result in more distortion than replacement of less significant bits. In lossy media compression that uses bit-planes it gives more freedom to encode less significant bit-planes, as illustrated in the image above, the early bitplanes, particularly the first, may have constant runs of bits, and thus can be efficiently encoded by run-length encoding. This is done in the Progressive Graphics File image format, for instance, some computers displayed graphics in bit-plane format, most notably the Amiga and Atari ST, contrasting with the more common packed format. This allowed certain classes of image manipulation to be performed using bitwise operations, some motion estimation algorithms can be performed using bit planes. This can sometimes provide a good approximation for correlation operations with minimal computational cost. This relies on an observation that the information is more significant than the actual values. Convolutions may be reduced to bit shift and popcount operations, or performed in dedicated hardware, bitplane formats may be used for passing images to Spiking neural networks, or low precision approximations to neural networks/convolutional neural networks. Many image processing packages can split an image into bit-planes, open source tools such as Pamarith from Netpbm and Convert from ImageMagick can be used to generate bit-planes
6.
Original Chip Set
–
The Original Chip Set was a chipset used in the earliest Commodore Amiga computers and defined the Amigas graphics and sound capabilities. It was succeeded by the slightly improved Enhanced Chip Set and greatly improved Advanced Graphics Architecture, the original chipset appeared in Amiga models built between 1985 and 1990, the Amiga 1000, Amiga 2000, Amiga CDTV, and Amiga 500. The chipset which gave the Amiga its unique graphics features consists of three custom chips, Agnus, Denise, and Paula. Both the original chipset and the chipset were manufactured using NMOS logic technology by Commodores chip manufacturing subsidiary. According to Jay Miner, the OCS chipset was fabricated in 5 µm manufacturing process while AGA Lisa was implemented in 1.5 µm process. All three custom chips were packaged in 48-pin DIPs, later versions of Agnus, known as Fat Agnus, were packaged in an 84-pin PLCC. Agnus is the chip in the design. It controls all access to chip RAM from both the central 68000 processor and the custom chips, using a complicated priority system. Agnus includes sub-components known as the blitter and the Copper, the original Agnus can address 512 KB of chip RAM. Later revisions, dubbed Fat Agnus, added 512 KB pseudo-fast RAM, Denise is the main video processor. Without using overscan, the Amigas graphics display is 320 or 640 pixels wide by 200 or 256 pixels tall, Denise also supports interlacing, which doubles the vertical resolution, at the cost of intrusive flickering on most monitors produced during the same timeframe as the Amiga computers. Planar bitmap graphics are used, which splits the individual bits per pixel into separate areas of memory, in normal operation, Denise allows between one and five bitplanes, giving two to 32 unique colors. These colors are selected from a palette of 4096 colors, a 6th bitplane is available for two special video modes, Halfbrite mode and Hold-And-Modify mode. Denise also supports eight sprites, single pixel scrolling, and a dual-playfield mode, Denise also handles mouse and digital joystick input. Paula also handles interrupts and various I/O functions including the disk drive, the serial port. The Agnus chip is in control of the entire chipsets operation. All operations are synchronised to the position of the video beam and this includes access to the built-in RAM, known as chip RAM because the chipset has access to it. Both the central 68000 processor and other members of the chipset have to arbitrate for access to chip RAM via Agnus, in computing architecture terms, this is Direct Memory Access, where Agnus is the DMA Controller
7.
IrfanView
–
IrfanView is an image viewer, editor, organiser and converter program for Microsoft Windows. It can also play video and audio files, and has some image creation, IrfanView is free for non-commercial use, commercial use requires paid registration. It is noted for its size, speed, ease of use. It was first released in 1996, IrfanView is named after its creator, Irfan Skiljan, from Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, living in Vienna. IrfanView works under all versions of Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 10 and can also be run in Linux under Wine and in Mac OS X using WineBottler. The basic 32-bit installation of IrfanView occupies 2 MB of disk space, the program can be downloaded directly to a U3 compatible device. IrfanView is specifically optimized for fast image display and loading times, while viewing images, there are several fit-to-screen scaling options and an automatic slideshow function. The viewer can open in all the image-files and video clips contained in a folder. Slideshows can contain both still images and video clips, IrfanView can create screensavers and slide shows from collections of images with optional accompanying MP3 audio. These can be saved as stand-alone executables which run on Windows computers without IrfanView installed, for slideshow creation, screensaver creation and batch image translations, preset image processing steps can be applied to selected sets of images. IrfanView can create icons by converting common graphic files into. ico format and it supports Adobe-compatible 8BF image processing filters, including many freely downloadable ones, primarily for application to whole images. It also has extended support for taking screenshots, image editing includes crop, resize, and rotate. Images can be adjusted by modifying their brightness, contrast, tint, and gamma level manually or automatically, many of these changes can be applied to multiple images in one operation using batch processing. Resize can be applied towards the display of animated GIF images to make them larger in either windowed or full-screen modes, lossless functions can be applied to JPG images in order to optimize the files without change to the displayed image. IrfanView can direct the image to open in an external graphics editor if it is installed. Four more keyboard shortcuts allow the files to be renamed, moved, copied or deleted individually, the program has been internationalized in over twenty languages, English is the default. The IrfanView toolbar can be skinned from many sets of icons, IrfanView uses plugins to handle a variety of additional image, video, and sound formats and to add optional functionality such as filter processing or other program features. With the variety of plugins, the program has been recommended for viewing obscure image formats, or corrupted files
8.
O'Reilly Media
–
OReilly Media is an American media company established by Tim OReilly that publishes books and Web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics. Their distinctive brand features a woodcut of an animal on many of their book covers, the company began in 1978 as a private consulting firm doing technical writing, based in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. In 1984, it began to retain publishing rights on manuals created for Unix vendors, a few 70-page Nutshell Handbooks were well-received, but the focus remained on the consulting business until 1988. After a conference displaying OReillys preliminary Xlib manuals attracted significant attention, in 1992, OReilly Media published one of the first popular books about the Internet, Ed Krols Whole Internet Users Guide and Catalog. OReilly Media also created the first web portal, the Global Network Navigator in 1993, it was sold to AOL in 1995, GNN was the first site on the World Wide Web to feature paid advertising. The firm is now recognized for the conferences and summits it organizes. In 1997, OReilly launched The Perl Conference to raise the profile of the Perl programming language, many of the companys other software bestsellers were also on topics that were off the radar of the commercial software industry. In 1998, OReilly invited many of the leaders of projects to a meeting. Originally called the summit, the meeting became known as the Open Source Summit. The OReilly Open Source Convention is now one of OReillys flagship events, other key events include the Strata Conference on big data, the Velocity Conference on Web Performance and Operations, and FOO Camp. Past events of note include the OReilly Emerging Technology Conference and the Web 2.0 Summit, overall, OReilly describes its business not as publishing or conferences, but as changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. In 2001, O’Reilly launched Safari Books Online, a subscription based service providing access to ebooks as a joint venture with the Pearson Technology Group. In 2013, O’Reilly acquired Pearson’s interest in the joint venture, in 2003, after the dot com bust, O’Reilly’s corporate goal was to reignite enthusiasm in the computer industry. Dale Dougherty, an executive at O’Reilly, coined the phrase Web 2.0 during a brainstorming session and this then became the name for the Web 2.0 Summit run by OReilly Media and TechWeb. In May 2006 CMP Media learned of an event called the Web 2.0 Half day conference. Concerned over their obligation to take reasonable means to enforce their trade and service marks CMP sent a cease and this attempt to restrict through legal mechanisms the use of the term was criticized by some. In 2004, the named the Maker Movement with the launch of Make. Today, the flagship Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, other Faires around the world collectively draw millions
9.
International Standard Book Number
–
The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
10.
Raster graphics
–
Raster images are stored in image files with varying formats. A raster is technically characterized by the width and height of the image in pixels, the printing and prepress industries know raster graphics as contones. The opposite to contones is line work, usually implemented as vector graphics in digital systems, the word raster has its origins in the Latin rastrum, which is derived from radere. It originates from the scan of cathode ray tube video monitors. By association, it can refer to a rectangular grid of pixels. The word rastrum is now used to refer to a device for drawing musical staff lines, most modern computers have bitmapped displays, where each on-screen pixel directly corresponds to a small number of bits in memory. The screen is refreshed simply by scanning through pixels and coloring them according to set of bits. The refresh procedure, being speed critical, is implemented by dedicated circuitry. Most computer images are stored in raster graphics formats or compressed variations, including GIF, JPEG, and PNG, three-dimensional voxel raster graphics are employed in video games and are also used in medical imaging such as MRI scanners. GIS programs commonly use rasters that encode geographic data in the values as well as the pixel locations. Raster graphics are resolution dependent, meaning they cannot scale up to a resolution without loss of apparent quality. This property contrasts with the capabilities of graphics, which easily scale up to the quality of the device rendering them. Raster graphics deal more practically than vector graphics with photographs and photo-realistic images, typically, a resolution of 150 to 300 PPI works well for 4-color process printing. However, for printing technologies that perform color mixing through dithering rather than through overprinting, printer DPI and image PPI have a different meaning. Thus, for instance, printing an image at 250 PPI may actually require a printer setting of 1200 DPI, when an image is rendered in a raster-based image editor, the image is composed of millions of pixels. At its core, an image editor works by manipulating each individual pixel. Most pixel-based image editors work using the RGB color model, and this article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the relicensing terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later
11.
APNG
–
The Animated Portable Network Graphics file format is an extension to the Portable Network Graphics specification. It allows for animated PNG files that work similarly to animated GIF files, while supporting 24-bit images and it also retains backward compatibility with non-animated PNG files. The first frame of an APNG file is stored as a normal PNG stream, the frame speed data and extra animation frames are stored in extra chunks. APNG competes with Multiple-image Network Graphics, a format for bitmapped animations created by the same team as PNG. APNGs advantage is the library size and compatibility with older PNG implementations. The APNG specification was created in 2004 by Stuart Parmenter and Vladimir Vukićević of the Mozilla Corporation to allow for storing the animations needed for such as throbbers. Among users and maintainers of the PNG and MNG formats, APNG had a lukewarm reception, in particular, PNG was conceived to be a single-image format. The PNG group officially rejected APNG as an extension on April 20,2007. There have been several subsequent proposals for a simple animated graphics format based on PNG using several different approaches, Mozilla Firefox added support for APNG in version 3 trunk builds on March 23,2007. Iceweasel 3 supports APNG by using Mozillas unofficial variant of libpng, in 2008 WorldDMB adopted APNG as a backward compatible extension to enable animation as part of the MOT SlideShow user application for Digital Radio. APNG1.0 Specification - Animated Portable Network Graphics is included as normative Annex A in the ETSI standard TS101499 V2.2.1, in 2010 Commercial Radio Broadcasters in Sydney began to include APNG animations in DAB+ digital radio broadcasts. These APNG animations are carried by the MOT slideshow application which accompanies the audio services and it is expected that other cities in Australia will follow in early 2011. Mozillas role in extending the PNG format to APNG echoes Netscapes much earlier role in popularizing animated GIFs, in 2016, Apple adopted the APNG format as the preferred format for animated stickers in iOS10 iMessage apps. On March 15,2017 APNG support was added to Chromium and this leaves Microsoft Edges Rendering Engine as the only engine to not support the format. A server-side library exists that allows web browsers that support the canvas tag, examples of such browsers include Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 9. For image processing software that doesnt export to APNG, users can use a program called APNG Assembler and it creates highly optimized Animated PNG files from PNG/TGA image sequences. A PNG file consists of the PNG Signature, followed by a series of chunks, a chunk consists of four parts, Length, Chunk type, Chunk data and CRC. There are about 20 different chunk types, but for a minimal PNG, only 3 are required, The IHDR chunk, one or more IDAT chunks, the next graphic shows the contents of such a minimal PNG file, representing just one red pixel
12.
BMP file format
–
The BMP file format is capable of storing two-dimensional digital images both monochrome and color, in various color depths, and optionally with data compression, alpha channels, and color profiles. The Windows Metafile specification covers the BMP file format, among others wingdi. h defines BMP constants and structures. They called these device-independent bitmaps or DIBs, and the format for them is called DIB file format or BMP image file format. According to Microsoft support, A device-independent bitmap is a used to define device-independent bitmaps in various color resolutions. The main purpose of DIBs is to allow bitmaps to be moved from one device to another, a DIB is an external format, in contrast to a device-dependent bitmap, which appears in the system as a bitmap object. A DIB is normally transported in metafiles, BMP files, the following sections discuss the data stored in the BMP file or DIB in detail. This is the standard BMP file format, some applications create bitmap image files which are not compliant with the Microsoft documentation. Also, not all fields are used, a value of 0 will be found in these unused fields, the bitmap image file consists of fixed-size structures as well as variable-size structures appearing in a predetermined sequence. Many different versions of some of these structures can appear in the file, the in-memory DIB data structure is almost the same as the BMP file format, but it does not contain the 14-byte bitmap file header and begins with the DIB header. For DIBs loaded in memory, the table can also consist of 16-bit entries that constitute indexes to the currently realized palette. In all cases, the array must begin at a memory address that is a multiple of 4 bytes. In non-packed DIBs loaded in memory, the optional color profile data should be located immediately after the table and before the gap1. In all cases, the array must begin at a memory address that is a multiple of 4 bytes. In some cases it may be necessary to adjust the number of entries in the table in order to force the memory address of the pixel array to a multiple of 4 bytes. For packed DIBs loaded in memory, the optional color profile data should immediately follow the pixel array, packed DIBs are required by Windows clipboard API functions as well as by some Windows patterned brush and resource functions. This block of bytes is at the start of the file and is used to identify the file, a typical application reads this block first to ensure that the file is actually a BMP file and that it is not damaged. The first 2 bytes of the BMP file format are the character B then the character M in ASCII encoding, all of the integer values are stored in little-endian format. This block of bytes tells the detailed information about the image
13.
BSAVE (bitmap format)
–
A BSAVE Image as it is referenced in a graphics program is an image file format created usually by saving raw video memory to disk. The BASIC BSAVE command is a general command meant for dumping ranges of addresses to disk. Data could be recalled using the counterpart BLOAD command, some platforms provided a BRUN command that would immediately attempt to execute the loaded RAM image as a program. BSAVE was in use as a file format when the IBM PC was introduced. It was also in use on the Apple II in the same time period. Although the commands were available on the Commodore PET line, they were removed from the later Commodore 64, in 1985 the Commodore 128 was released with Commodore BASIC version 7.0 which restored the BSAVE and BLOAD commands. The BSAVED format is a device-dependent raster image format, the file header stores information about the hardware address. The graphics data follows the header directly and is stored as raw data in the format of the native adapters addressable memory, there is no file compression, and therefore these load very quickly and without much programming when displayed in native mode. No additional information, such as screen resolution, color depth and palette information, bit planes, Video adapters were simple when this format was in wide use and the other information necessary to display the image could usually be inferred by programs that loaded such files. The BASIC programming language was shipped as part of the system on the first IBM PCs, Apple. On computers that did not start up in BASIC, BASIC was loaded by manually running the BASIC interpreter, the user could then type BASIC commands in direct mode or by creating and/or running a numbered BASIC program within the interpreter. One of the commands that early BASIC offered was BSAVE and another command was BLOAD, using the BSAVE command, an addressable area and length of memory could be saved to disk as a named file. This Image of saved memory could then be reloaded from disk into addressable memory later with the BLOAD command, if the BSAVEd image contained program code it could be executed, if data it could be used again, and if the BSAVEd image contained graphics it could be viewed. The video area of memory was addressable, the PUT and GET commands were used in addition to the BSAVE and BLOAD commands on the IBM PC to allow clips of the screen to be pre-formatted for BSAVE and BLOAD. PUT and GET allowed display modifier verbs which resembled functions in the Windows Graphical Device Interface used by programmers later. Microsoft produced the BASIC interpreters that were bundled with the IBM PC, Apple II, and Commodore PET, and included the ability to BSAVE and BLOAD RAM images on all 3 platforms. It was possible for users of the day to use the BLOAD command to load a graphics image that had been BSAVED in addition to loading a BSAVED executable or data image. With the passing of MS-DOS so did the use of DOS programs that saved in the BSAVED format and their use by programmers has stopped because the BLOAD command is no longer supported in modern programming languages which discourage accessing video memory directly
14.
FITS
–
Flexible Image Transport System is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy, the FITS format was first standardized in 1981, it has evolved gradually since then, and the most recent version was standardized in 2008. FITS was designed with an eye towards long-term archival storage, a major feature of the FITS format is that image metadata is stored in a human-readable ASCII header, so that an interested user can examine the headers to investigate a file of unknown provenance. The information in the header is designed to calculate the byte offset of some information in the subsequent data unit to direct access to the data cells. Each FITS file consists of one or more headers containing ASCII card images that carry keyword/value pairs, FITS is also often used to store non-image data, such as spectra, photon lists, data cubes, or even structured data such as multi-table databases. A FITS file may contain several extensions, and each of these may contain a data object, for example, it is possible to store x-ray and infrared exposures in the same file. The earliest and still most commonly used type of FITS data is an image header/data block, the term image is somewhat loosely applied, as the format supports data arrays of arbitrary dimension—normal image data are usually 2-D or 3-D. The data themselves may be in one of several integer and floating-point formats, FITS image headers can contain information about one or more scientific coordinate systems that are overlaid on the image itself. The WCS standard includes many different spherical projections, including, for example, FITS also supports tabular data with named columns and multidimensional rows. Both binary and ASCII table formats have been specified, the data in each column of the table can be in a different format from the others. Together with the ability to string multiple header/data blocks together, this allows FITS files to represent entire relational databases, the FITS Support Office at NASA/GSFC maintains a list of libraries and platforms that currently support FITS. Image processing programs such as ImageJ, GIMP, Photoshop, XnView and IrfanView can generally read simple FITS images, scientific teams frequently write their own code to interact with their FITS data, using the tools available in their language of choice. The FITS Liberator software is used by imaging scientists at the European Space Agency, the SAOImage DS9 Astronomical Data Visualization Application is available for many OSs, and handles images and headers. Many scientific computing environments make use of the system data in the FITS header to display, compare, rectify. The FITS standard version 3.0 was officially approved by the IAU FITS Working Group in July 2008, FITS I/O Libraries, a list of software for reading and writing FITS files for various languages