NATO Military Symbols for Land Based Systems

NATO Military Symbols for Land Based Systems was the NATO standard for military map marking symbols. It was published as Allied Procedural Publication 6A (APP-6A). The symbols are designed to enhance NATO’s joint interoperability by providing a standard set of common symbols. APP-6A constitutes a single system of joint military symbology for land based formations and units, which can be displayed for either automated map display systems or for manual map marking. It covers all of the joint services and can be used by them.

History

The first basic military map symbols began to be used by western armies in the decades following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. During World War I, there was a degree of harmonisation between the British and French systems, including the adoption of the colour red for enemy forces and blue for allies; the British had previously used red for friendly troops because of the traditional red coats of British soldiers. However, the system now in use is broadly based on that devised by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1917. The infantry symbol of a saltire in a rectangle was said to symbolise the crossed belts of an infantryman, while the single diagonal line for cavalry was said to represent the sabre belt. With the formation of NATO in 1949, the US Army system was standardised and adapted, with different shapes for friendly (blue rectangle), hostile (red diamond) and unknown (yellow quatrefoil) forces.

App

App, apps or APP may refer to:

Computing

Education

Entertainment

JPEG

JPEG (/ˈdʒeɪpɛɡ/ JAY-peg) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality.

JPEG compression is used in a number of image file formats. JPEG/Exif is the most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image capture devices; along with JPEG/JFIF, it is the most common format for storing and transmitting photographic images on the World Wide Web. These format variations are often not distinguished, and are simply called JPEG.

The term "JPEG" is an abbreviation for the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which created the standard. The MIME media type for JPEG is image/jpeg, except in older Internet Explorer versions, which provides a MIME type of image/pjpeg when uploading JPEG images. JPEG files usually have a filename extension of .jpg or .jpeg.

Graphical Environment Manager

The Graphical Environment Manager (GEM) was an operating environment created by Digital Research, Inc. (DRI) for use with the DOS operating system on the Intel 8088 and Motorola 68000 microprocessors.

GEM is known primarily as the graphical user interface (GUI) for the Atari ST series of computers, and was also supplied with a series of IBM PC-compatible computers from Amstrad. It also was available for standard IBM PC, at the time when the 6 MHz IBM PC AT (and the very concept of a GUI) was brand new. It was the core for a small number of DOS programs, the most notable being Ventura Publisher. It was ported to a number of other computers that previously lacked graphical interfaces, but never gained popularity on those platforms. DRI also produced FlexGem for their FlexOS real-time operating system.

History

GSX

GEM started life at DRI as a more general purpose graphics library known as GSX (Graphics System eXtension), written by a team led by Don Heiskell. Lee Lorenzen (at Graphic Software Systems, Inc.) who had recently left Xerox PARC (birthplace of the GUI) wrote much of the code. GSX was essentially a DRI-specific implementation of the GKS graphics standard proposed in the late 1970s. GSX was intended to allow DRI to write graphics programs (charting, etc.) for any of the platforms CP/M-80, CP/M-86 and MS-DOS (NEC APC-III) would run on, a task that would otherwise require considerable effort to port due to the large differences in graphics hardware (and concepts) between the various systems of that era.