BOMBS, BOOBS & BURGERS

We're into the plus-double-digits in temperature here in Toronto, so it looks like spring is finally on its way, thank the stars. I shouldn't complain too much, however, as I spent a sizeable part of the winter down in sunny California doing research. One of the places I visited was the University of Southern California, where much of the work in digital imaging was done in the seventies. The Signal and Image Processing Institute is responsible for laying much of the groundwork that went into the JPEG format, which is now the ubiquitous picture standard across the web and many digital devices. Sandy Sawchuk, one of the professors who was there in SIPI's early days, showed me this non-descript classroom/lab on campus. "We should have a plaque on the door that says, 'This is where the JPEG was born,'" he told me.


The really interesting part of this story is that the most important picture in the history of the internet, a cropped centerfold from Playboy, was also scanned in this room. The photo was one of the first images scanned and transmitted across the U.S. military's ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, and then became the de facto standard for image processors everywhere.