r/thirtyyearsago

Of course, it will become the most popular lossless image format and remain so to this day.

IMO it really filled a gap in the image format space—uncompressed bitmap formats were obviously not ideal, TIFF (1986†) was an overcomplicated mess despite Adobe's 1992 consolidation process, GIF (1987) did not support more than 256 colors‡ or alpha transparency and was patent-encumbered until 2004, standard JPEG (1991/1992) was obligately lossy and didn't support transparency, and lossless JPEG (1993) was supported by no-one and uses an entirely distinct encoding and decoding process from standard JPEG. It's especially impressive‖ that it used no fundamental techniques that weren't available even a decade prior to its release. Just wish it came with the APNG animation extension upon first release, and honestly non-RGB channel support, which it still lacks. Oh well...

By the way, its website is a glorious time capsule from the Y2K era, with some of its design features persisting even from the earliest Internet Archive capture I can find (yes, a NASA JPL .gov site, no wonder they had to move it) from November 21, 1996. Unfortunately, it appears to be down at the moment, hopefully just for some minor maintenance.

†Specifically September 12, 1986. I could make a belated r/40yearsago post, but ehh.

‡Technically it does—you can change color palettes on a per-frame basis and/or split the image into multiple tiled image blocks each with their own palette, but both of those techniques come with their own problems.

‖And perhaps infuriating; even its development and formalization were prolonged, with its format effectively being frozen (and compliant images created) by March 7, 1995.