PiCture eXchange (.pcx)
The PCX file extension, standing for PiCture eXchange, is a raster image format developed by ZSoft Corporation in 1985 for its PC Paintbrush software. It became one of the first widely accepted DOS imaging standards, supporting palette-indexed images from 2 to 256 colors and later true-color (24-bit) images. PCX files use RLE (Run-Length Encoding) compression, making them smaller in size. Although largely replaced by formats like BMP, JPEG, and PNG, PCX was pivotal in early computer graphics and is still supported by various image processing software.