John Bridges is the co-author of the computer program

PCPaint PCPaint was the first IBM PC-based mouse-driven GUI paint program. It was developed by John Bridges and Doug Wolfgram. It was later developed into Pictor Paint. The hardware manufacturer Mouse Systems bundled PCPaint with millions of compute ...

and primary developer of the program

GRASP A grasp is an act of taking, holding or seizing firmly with (or as if with) the hand. An example of a grasp is the handshake, wherein two people grasp one of each other's like hands. In zoology particularly, prehensility is the quality of an appe ...

for Microtex Industries with Doug Wolfgram. He is also the sole author of GLPro and AfterGRASP. His article entitled "Differential Image Compression" was published in the February 1991 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.

Early work

In 1980 Bridges started his programming career at the NYU Institute for Reconstructive Plastic Surgery as a summer intern, working with sophisticated programmable vector graphics systems. He wrote editing tools and also updated and debugged software used for early 3D x-ray scanning research. From 1981-85 Bridges wrote the RAM disk drivers, utilities, cracking software, task switching software, and memory test diagnostics for Abacus, a maker of large memory cards for the

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-mold ...

. In 1982, he started working for Classroom Consortia Media, Inc., an educational software company, developing and writing Apple and IBM graphics libraries and tools for their software. During his tenure there he created a drawing program called SuperDraw for CCM, and on his own wrote the core graphics code for what would later become

, as well as develop the

GRASP GL library format A grasp is an act of taking, holding or seizing firmly with (or as if with) the hand. An example of a grasp is the handshake, wherein two people grasp one of each other's like hands. In zoology particularly, prehensility Prehensility is th ...

PCPaint

In 1984, Bridges developed the first version of

with Doug Wolfgram for Mouse Systems. PCPaint was the first IBM PC-based mouse driven GUI paint program. The company purchased the exclusive rights to PCPaint, and John continued development until 1990.

GRASP

In 1985, Bridges' PCPaint code and Doug's slideshow program morphed into a new program, GRASP. GRASP was the first multimedia animation program for the IBM PC and created the

. GRASP was originally released as shareware through Doug's company, Microtex Industries. However, version 2.0 and after were sold commercially by Paul Mace Software. Doug sold his shares of both PCPaint and GRASP to Bridges in 1990, and Bridges' work on GRASP continued through 1994, when he terminated the contract with Paul Mace Software. Bridges' work on GRASP included several toolsets and add-ons, such as

Pictor Paint PCPaint was the first IBM PC-based mouse-driven GUI paint program. It was developed by John Bridges and Doug Wolfgram. It was later developed into Pictor Paint. The hardware manufacturer Mouse Systems bundled PCPaint with millions of compute ...

, ARTools, HRFE (High Res Flic Enhancement), and PC Speaker sound code that caused Paul Mace Software to be threatened with a lawsuit by RealSound because of the use of frequency modulation, upon which RealSound held a patent. A stripped-down version of GRASP 4.0 was also included with copies of Philip Shaddock's ''Multimedia Creations: Hands-On Workshop for Exploring Animation and Sound''.

VIDSPEED

In 1987, Bridges released VIDSPEED, a freeware program that tests the speed of graphics cards by " easuringthe throughput of writing constant pixel data to video memory over the bus in graphics modes." VIDSPEED was well received in the community and was recommended in at least two books, Patrick Killelea's ''Web Performance Tuning'' and Stephen J. Bigelow's ''Bigelow's Computer Repair Toolkit'', though Bigelow expresses concern over support and updates.

IBM Project

In 1986-87 Bridges authored a project for the IBM Multimedia Lab which played back full color video in a 1/4 size window on the new IBM Model 30 (8 MHz 8086 CPU) which had the new MCGA 320x200 256-color video mode. Not only did it play full color video at such an early date in DOS history, but it did so smoothly on one of the slowest, most low-end IBM PS/2 models sold. IBM applied for a patent on algorithms he developed, though it was filed under the name of the project manager at IBM. Those same algorithms were later published in an article by Bridges entitled "Differential Image Compression", which first appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal in February 1991. It was later reprinted in that same magazine in July 2001 along with James H. Sylvester's 1993 article "Differential Compression Algorithms", which adapts Bridges' algorithms to generalized data, not just graphics.

IMAGETOOLS

Out of the IBM Project came IMAGETOOLS in 1987, a collection of high color (15bit, 24bit, 32bit) VGA/EGA image conversion and scaling tools. It was sold by MetaCreations Corp./Harvard Systems Corp (HSC Software).

PICEM

In 1988, Bridges authored a freeware image viewer program called PICEM. Other image viewers at the time were commercial. PICEM also allowed the user to adjust images' brightness and contrast and to save the image being viewed to other formats including the BSAVE (graphics image format). PICEM became popular enough that Microsoft offered tech help in using it in conjunction with

QuickBasic Microsoft QuickBASIC (also QB) is an Integrated Development Environment (or IDE) and compiler for the BASIC programming language that was developed by Microsoft. QuickBASIC runs mainly on DOS, though there was also a short-lived version for the ...

VGAKIT

Also in 1988, Bridges released VGAKIT, the VGAKIT SVGA Programming Kit, as freeware. VGAKIT is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

library for accessing extended graphics modes from DOS, which was not standardized before VESA VBE arrived. It was used in several open and closed source projects. The developer of

UniVBE UniVBE (short for ''Universal VESA BIOS Extensions'') is a software driver that allows DOS applications written to the VESA BIOS standard to run on almost any display device made in the last 15 years or so. The UniVBE driver was written by SciT ...

, a program that extended video cards' BIOS to become compatible with the new VESA VBE, said that Bridges "provided the information without which niVBEwould never have gotten started. The whole PC graphics community is deeply in his debt." Author Michael Abrash, in his 1997 book ''Graphics Programming Black Book'', says "Little other than my DDJ ( Dr. Dobb's Journal) columns has been published about (

Mode X Mode X is an alternative 256-color graphics display mode of the IBM VGA graphics hardware that was popularized by Michael Abrash. It was first published in July 1991 in '' Dr. Dobb's Journal'', and republished in chapters 47-49 of Abrash's ''Gra ...

), although Bridges has widely distributed his code for a number of undocumented 256-color resolutions, and I’d like to acknowledge the influence of his code on the mode set routine presented in

hapter 47 The following is a glossary of terms used in the description of lichens, composite organisms that arise from algae or cyanobacteria living among filaments of multiple fungus species in a mutualistic relationship. Until the end of the 18th c ...

" The codes to which Abrash refers are Mode X 360x480 256-color mode codes Bridges included with VGAKIT, and worked on any VGA, not just SVGAs. Abrash's DDJ articles were published circa 1991 before being compiled into ''GPBB''.

Pictor Paint and ARTOOLS

When GRASP 3.5 was released, it included Bridges' newest version of PCPaint,

. Version 4.0 included Bridges' ARTOOLS, which was a collection of image manipulation tools which included an early morphing utility that tracked all points in source and destination images, creating all the in-between frames.

GLPro

In 1995, Bridges created GLPro for IMS as the newest incarnation of Bridges' ideas behind GRASP updated for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

. In 2000 GLPro became property of GMedia PLC, which closed in 2001. Bridges stopped all GLPro work at that time. A stripped down version of GLPro was included with Conrad R. Brandt's book ''GLPRO Foundations 2000''.

AfterGRASP

In 2002, Bridges started work on a new program, AfterGRASP, designed to be backwards compatible with GLPro. Work is still continuing on that project.

Pictor PIC image format

The PICtor PIC image format is an

image file format An Image file format is a file format for a digital image. There are many formats that can be used, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Most formats up until 2022 were for storing 2D images, not 3D ones. The data stored in an image file format may be ...

developed by Bridges for

. It was also the native file format for

, and GLPro and was the first widely accepted DOS imaging standard.

References

External Pages

AfterGRASP Homepage

GLPro Mailing List Archive

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bridges, John Computer programmers Free software programmers Programming language designers Living people Year of birth missing (living people)