At this moment, things come to my mind about pictures on computers. This is ignoring anything since about 2010.

I once was young and foolish, as we all were, and took an interest in the new very micro computers that were sold after 1980 or so, A Spectrun was an early one, then an Amiga 500, and so on. The Amiga was the first actually useful one. There were IBM thingies, but they were not really fun. One thing the Amiga could do was deal with Pictures and Moving Picture, the standards for Picture was GIF and JPG, for moving pictures MPG and AVI, and there was a form for GIF, identified by the .webm suffix.

(If you want some fun and have a Windows Computer, you can try writing a short program which will take a word, and add suffixis, from *.AAA to *ZZZ. The machine will try to display or execute them in amusing ways. The idea can be developed.)

There are lots of standards for picture files. One that consists of series of numbers reflecting exactly what is in the file is *.TIFF, used for things like X-Ray photos. Keep away from that. The fun ones are *.GIF and *.JPEG.

You would once be paid to change them, say make them more revealing. There was a secret, inside those files there was a section starting by the text JFIF, that could only be read and changed by binary editors, like the Vi variant bvi.

One should be aware of all this when looking at amazing pictures. I will write no more, in case it is illegal now to even write about such things.

--
greymausg@mail.com
That's not a mousehole!

maus wrote:

> there was a form for GIF, identified by the .webm suffix.

No relation. GIF is ancient, WEBM is relatively arj.

> I will write no more, in case it is illegal now to even write about such things.

Eh?