Johnson-Grace is a

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

company based in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. The company was founded by Steve Johnson and Chris Grace in

Newport Beach, California Newport Beach is a coastal city in South Orange County, California. Newport Beach is known for swimming and sandy beaches. Newport Harbor once supported maritime industries however today, it is used mostly for recreation. Balboa Island, Newport ...

in 1992 to develop a generic spreadsheet technology for simulation modeling. The founders later talked to Irving Reed at the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

, who had an idea for an improved image compression algorithm, and started implementing such an algorithm; this became the

ART image file format ART is a proprietary image file format used mostly by the America Online (AOL) service and client software. Technical details The ART format (file extension ".art") holds a single still image that has been highly compressed. The format was ...

. The company was acquired by

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017� ...

on February 1, 1996, for approximately 1.6 million shares of stock.

Notes

Further reading