Steve wrote:
>
> There are 1, 4, 8, or 24 bit BMPs. Hmmm, I wonder
> why no 16 bit.
There seem to be 16 bit .BMPs. They are 24 bit BMPs with only the first
five bits of each byte active, plus an extra bit.
> And there seems to be no real standard. From the
> O'reilly Graphics File Format FAQ:
> (http://www.oreilly.com/centers/gff/gff-faq/gff-faq3.htm#15)
>
> "There is not single document that is the official
> 'BMP Format Specification'. Instead, BMP information
> is spread over several programming references."
This may be true, but the info seems pretty concentrated here:
http://www.wotsit.org/
> Certainly in any kind of "standard" format, if there
> is no *single, official* standard, then there will be
> multiple standards. Multiple standards mean some viewers
> will not see some BMP formats, for instance, the BMPs
> that Arachne can't see:
> http://wizard.dyndns.org/997967481.zbm
> (Yes, the server has the mime type added. That makes
> me, what? the 3rd or 4th server in the world to do
> this? ;-)
You co-operation is greatly appreciated. ;-)
And I will look at that when I get home because neither this Netscape,
running on Windows, or Windows itself will show me a .BMP !!!!
Some M$ proprietary format eh ?
> >From the google pdftotext version of:
>
>http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:LddMTROxrT8:www.deakin.edu.au/~agoodman/sci204/chapter10.pdf+dib+graphics+format+origins
>
> BMP
> The Microsoft Windows Bitmap was derived from the MSP file
> format of the (black and white) Paint program in the earlier versions
> of Windows. It shares many of the characteristics (both good and
> bad) of the PCX format: simple RLE compression, late addition of
> 24-bit support, and some degree of device-dependence. Supported
> by all Windows development environments, it is universally used
> (often in conjunction with other formats) as a sort of `lowest
> common denominator' by Windows applications.
>
> I'm sure that, like QDOS, Paint was merely something that
> Billy Boy scooped up from somewhere else and put his own
> name on, but the fact remains that in the historical
> context of the desktop computer age, BMP has "always"
> been defined as the Windows Bitmap Image format.
My limited and possibly faulty memory has entries for TI (TI-99 ?) and
Commodore computers, plus Atari and other video game manufacturers which
used Bit Mapped Images years before Bill Gates started screwing us.
If I may offer the following entertaining quotes:
The PrintMaster Saga
A Historical "FanFact"
"Probably the best feature of PrintMaster... was the artwork that Don Joyce
(of Negativland/Over The Edge fame) did. The amazing thing about Don was that
he walked in having never done computer-based art before, and came up with
these amazing images the first day he tried our rather hokey bitmap editor.
I thought the artwork was much more sophisticated than what Broderbund was
shipping at the time. Amazing for the format (those little bitmaps...)"
- An Early PrintMaster Developer
+
A computer story:
When I first came upon computers in the early 80s, I was impressed with the
then current philosophical approach to creating graphics interfacing which
suggested that the goal was to get the computer to act like your brain does,
to be intuitively useable.
Then this all reversed and didn't seem to matter anymore. Rather suddenly, we
had to learn with difficulty art programs that had and have little to do with
how our art brains want to work.
When stuff like Adobe appeared, the goal was then to force your brain into
compliance with distinctly unintuitive graphic processes.
Computers were no longer trying to be like us, we were trying to be like
computers.
That's backwards, and that's when I got out of computer graphics for good.
I still like computers, they're great for writing and probably a few other
things, but they remain to this day the worst and most unsympathetic of all
mediums to attempt visual art on. Unless you have a hollywood million to work
with, they're just plain klunky and force you up against more road blocks
than you can shake a mouse at as far as serious art (the human brain type)
is concerned.
DJ (Don Joyce) 1999
+
BITMAPPED DISPLAY: pioneered by XEROX PARC, draws images by setting PIXELS in
a BITMAP which is displayed on the screen. Display needing
constant refresh uses frame buffer in video RAM.
Since in a raster system the entire grid of, say, 1024 lines
of 1024 pixels must be stored explicitly, the availability
of inexpensive solid-state random-access memory (RAM) for
bitmaps in the early SEVENTIES was the breakthrough needed
to make raster graphics the dominant hardware technology.
(MY capitals for seventies.)
M$oft may have introduced the Device Independant Bitmap (.DIB) but that
is no reason to associate their name with the much older general application
- although I recognize that you can find many references which do exactly
that.
Given enough time, we will see that this message has the 'properties' of
a Microsoft Windows .TXT file, and someone will document that fact, and
someone else will accept it. :((
- Clarence Verge
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- The internet is infected - Windows is a VIRUS !!
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