Question about .jpg format

Factual Questions
1

I apologize if this has already been answered; I did a search and didn’t see a previous thread. I’ve also been searching online for a couple of hours and haven’t come up with anything.

When did .jpg format first become available for use?

Background: I’m doing research on a case where a person claims that a .jpg image is from the 80s, but my boss doesn’t believe that format was available during that time.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

:: off to continue searching ::

2

U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672 was filed on October 6, 1987 by Compression Labs, Inc., for the JPEG graphic compression format.

3

Well, that was nice. Hit ‘submit’ when I wasn’t done writing, and instead of ‘preview’ anyway. Let’s try again:

Here’s the patent. This was filed in 1986, granted in 1987, and is alleged to provide the theoretical underpinning of the format. This NY Times article on the Forgent website indicates that the JPEG group rolled out the standard in 1990. It must have caught on pretty fast, because I definitely remember seeing scads of JPEG’s in Usenet groups by 1992 or so …

4

Thanks, SCSimmons !

I wasn’t able to load the NY Times article as Adobe seems a bit wonky on my machine, but I’m hoping that all of the other info will help with this case.

Thanks again.

5

Here’s the patent.

6

K… I tried to post the addy also but in my preview it was messed.

7

The earliest Usenet posting containing “Jpeg” in Google’s archive is from Jan. 1990. It references a couple of late 1989 conference pubs. By late 1991 it was starting to generate significant notice in Usenet groups. So while technically “from the 1980s” it really wasn’t used to any noticable extent until the 1990s.

8

“The JPEG compression format was standardised by ISO in August 1990 and commercial applications using it began to show up in 1991. The widely used IJG implementation was first publicly released in October 1991 and has been considerably developed since that time.” (source W3C)

9

Any reason why the picture couldn’t be from the 80’s, but was converted to jpeg from some other format more recently? Or would that matter?

10

I’m not sure of the specifics on the case. I work for a forensic document examiner as a receptionist. I get to do the internet legwork (well, in this case SDMB did the legwork) and he gets to do all of the interesting stuff.

Wow! And I thought my first thread would hurt!