The story of the PNG format
In 1977 and 1978, two Israeli researchers, Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel worked on a set of compression algorithms, which were later named LZ77 and LZ78. Later, in 1983, Terry Welch from Sperry (which later merged with Burroughs to form Unisys) developed a very fast variant of LZ78 called LZW. Welch, together with two IBM researchers, Victor Miller and Mark Wegman, filled for a patent for LZW.
At the same time, Compuserve, specifically Bob Berry, was designing a new algorithm for a compressed image format, where they used the LZW

