News and History of the PNG Development Group from 1995

Herein lie news items and historical stuff primarily of interest to the Portable Network Graphics Development Group itself. Feel free to poke around even if you're not a member, though. Note that some of the links, particularly the older ones, are broken; in some cases this is explained by later entries. Other links (CompuServe, tcg.arl.mil) have fallen prey to reorganizations or upgrades; should they ever reappear, the entries below will be updated as needed.

Keep in mind that this is history here...

• current - see here

• 20 December 1995 - Dave Beckett has set up a third ftp/mirror site for PNG files at HENSA in the UK, accessible not only via ftp but also via http, gopher and even e-mail:
  • ftp://unix.hensa.ac.uk/pub/png/png/
  • http://www.hensa.ac.uk/png/png/
  • gopher://unix.hensa.ac.uk/1/.archive/png
  • ftpmail@unix.hensa.ac.uk
  Can't hardly get any niftier than that.

• 19 December 1995 - PNG receives a passing mention in PC Magazine's First Looks: HiJaak 95 as "the replacement for the .GIF format." Most cool.

• 15 December 1995 - Greg finally graduates.

• 8 December 1995 - The W3C releases the PNG specification, version 0.92, as an official Working Draft, in conjunction with the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW4).

• 26 November 1995 - PNG, the PNG home page and Greg are all mentioned in a follow-up issue of Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. "Cheeky and irreverent," indeed...

• 25 November 1995 - At the request of Chris Lilley (belatedly - sorry, Chris), please upload new PNG software to both ftp sites (see 22 August entry below). Apparently even hyper-networked Manchester has trouble getting across the Atlantic to swrinde for updates.

• 10 November 1995 - Kevin Savetz discusses GIF, ART and PNG in his Web Review article entitled "GIF up the Ghost."

• 30 October 1995 - PNG's built-in gamma capabilities earn it a mention in the 30 October issue of Keith Dawson's Tasty Bits from the Technology Front.

• 24 October 1995 - The first PNG baby is born.
  

• 29 August 1995 - pnmtopng/pngtopnm 2.0 and pngcheck 1.8 are released.

• 22 August 1995 - The PNG Group has not just one, but two new ftp sites! The primary one is ftp://swrinde.nde.swri.edu/pub/png/ , provided and maintained courtesy of Keith Pickens of the Southwest Research Institute. The secondary (European primary), which is also capable of independent updates if the primary dies, is ftp://ftp.mcc.ac.uk/pub/cgu/PNG/ and is provided and maintained courtesy of Chris Lilley and the Computer Graphics Unit at the University of Manchester in the UK. [The secondary is now dying, alas; see 19 April 1996.]

• 20 August 1995 - ftp.uu.net's mirroring software is reported to be dead (and to have been dead for the last month) due to a major disk failure on one of the administrative machines. So even if the PNG Group were to find a new site today, it would not be mirrorable immediately. Fortunately, Guy Schalnat has made both libpng and zlib available from Group 42's ftp server [deceased as of 1996, though]; see the PNG reference code page for details.

• 19 August 1995 - libpng 0.8 beta is released.

• 16 August 1995 - zlib 0.95 beta is released.

• 13 August 1995 - zlib 0.94 beta is released.

• 4 August 1995 - The PNG Home Page is now available via a new, much shorter and easier-to-remember URL: http://quest.jpl.nasa.gov/PNG/ . This page, for example, can now be referenced as http://quest.jpl.nasa.gov/PNG/pngnews.html .

• 27 July 1995 - Greg defends his dissertation.

• 21 July 1995 - The PNG mailing lists are reborn on dworkin.wustl.edu, another Majordomo system made available courtesy of Adam `7' Costello. The list membership as of 2 July was used to set up the new lists, but that information was still almost two weeks out of date. If you were on one or more of the lists as of 13 July and have not received any mail from the new list, send a message to majordomo@dworkin.wustl.edu with the word "help" in the body of the message. Then either see if your address has somehow been mangled ("who listname") or simply resubscribe. The three lists are png-announce (low-traffic, announcements only), png-list (general discussion) and png-implement (discussions of programming details and actual implementations).

• 13 July 1995 - Godzilli, the PNG Group's original mail- and archive-server, dies a horrible death of unknown causes. As of August it appears to be dead permanently.

• July 1995 - Dr. Dobb's Journal publishes an article by Lee Crocker describing the PNG format. It even gets cover billing. We're on a roll now...

• 24-26 June 1995 - libpng 0.7 and 0.71 betas (formerly pnglib) and zlib 0.93 beta are released. These versions begin appearing in lots of software, including the XV patch, X Mosaic, POV-Ray, Ghostscript, and so on. See the PNG apps page for details.

• 15 June 1995 - CompuServe officially announces the completion of PNG development (at least as far as their PR guys are concerned).

• 14 June 1995 - Macintosh "PNGf" file ID officially registered with Apple Computer by Kevin A. Mitchell. (Thanks to Tom Lane for providing a copy of the announcement message.)

• 13 June 1995 - The PNG Home Page makes its first appearance on the Web.

• 5 May 1995 - Draft 10 of the PNG specification is released, clarifying some points that became apparent as implementations progressed.

• 1 May 1995 - Guy releases pnglib 0.6 beta and Jean-loup and Mark release the first zlib beta, version 0.9. These are the first releases that are really complete enough to use in "real" software, and they are so used.

• 30 April 1995 - pnglib 0.5 beta is released.

• 26 April 1995 - pnglib 0.4 beta is released.

• 24 March 1995 - Guy releases the first beta (alpha?) version of pnglib (0.1). Guy dons mantle of Primo Graphics Stud Guy. (What a convenient and versatile name, eh?)

• 7 March 1995 - Glenn Randers-Pehrson posts the very first PNG images to the Web, followed a couple of weeks later by Lee Daniel Crocker. These images are still valid.

• 7 March 1995 - Draft 9 of the PNG specification is released. This is the final version in the sense that future drafts will be backwards compatible; the spec is hereby frozen. Only two months...yow! Is this a bunch of graphics studs or what?

• February - March 1995 - [other stuff to be filled in later]

• 13 February 1995 - Draft 8 of the PNG specification is released.

• 7 February 1995 - CompuServe (specifically, Tim Oren) officially announces its support for the PNG format as the basis for its GIF24 graphics format (successor to GIF). Cool.

• 2 February 1995 - Adam Costello proposes the Adam7 two-dimensional interlacing scheme.

• 1 February 1995 - Draft 7 of the PNG specification is released.

• 26 January 1995 - Tom Lane proposes the final form of the PNG magic signature: 137 P N G CR LF ^Z LF (or 137   80   78   71   13   10   26   10 in decimal).

• 24 January 1995 - Draft 6 of the PNG specification is released.

• 23 January 1995 - Draft 5 of the PNG specification is released; the "PNG" name is officially adopted.

• 16 January 1995 - Draft 4 of the PBF specification is released and is now available on the World Wide Web at http://sunsite.unc.edu/boutell/pbf.html .

• 16 January 1995 - CompuServe (and specifically Tim Oren, Vice President of Future Technology) announces the GIF24 development project and solicits suggestions from the graphics community at GIF24@csi.compuserve.com . OK, so they're only a little bit out of touch....

• 15 January 1995 - Draft 3 of the PBF specification is released.

• 10 January 1995 - Jeremy Wohl sets up the first PNG mailing list, ngf@godzilli.cs.sunysb.edu (for "New Graphics Format").

• 9 January 1995 - Jeremy Wohl proposes the Free Graphics Format (FGF), a GIF clone with deflate compression (like ZIF) and 24-bit support; he also provides a reference implementation.

• 8 January 1995 - Paul Haeberli proposes a gamma chunk. Jonathan Shekter proposes 48-bit RGB and 64-bit RGBA support.

• 7 January 1995 - Draft 2 of the PBF specification is released. Greg posts early compression results from a drop-in replacement of GIF's LZW code with Zip's deflate ("ZIF": around 10% improvement). Greg proposes including CRC(s) for easy checking of image integrity.

• 6 January 1995 - Oliver Fromme first suggests the "PNG" name (initially for "PiNG is Not GIF").

• 4 January 1995 - Thomas Boutell launches what would become known as the PNG project with Draft 1 of the Portable Bitmap Format (PBF) specification. Scott Elliott first proposes delta-filtering to improve compression. Tom Lane and many others propose the deflate algorithm as the compression engine. Many folks propose extending the new format to include 24-bit support.

• 28 December 1994 - CompuServe announces its new GIF licensing terms based on discussions with Unisys, owner of the patent on the LZW compression method used in GIF. Usenet and the Web find out a few days later and react in horror/outrage/indignation/etc.

Here are some related PNG pages at this site:

• Current News of the PNG Development Group
• Historical PNG news:
  • 2013 · 2012 · 2011 · 2010 · 2009 · 2008 · 2007 · 2006 · 2005 · 2004 · 2003 · 2002 · 2001 · 2000 · 1999 · 1998 · 1997 · 1996 · 1995
• History of PNG
• Current Status of PNG

• PNG Home Page
• Complete PNG Site Map

Copyright © 1995-2013 Greg Roelofs.