FOURCC History

The following interesting information was provided by Tim Kientzle:

"You credit Microsoft with the invention of the FourCC, but the idea actually goes back much, much further than that.

The basic idea is that a 32-bit integer can be treated as either four characters (easy to remember) or as a 32-bit number which can be quickly manipulated by software. Plus, a fixed-length field greatly simplifies aligning data structures, which provides a further speedup.

This idea was used in the IFF multimedia format developed by Electronic Arts for the Amiga in the early 1980s. This file format was copied by Apple (who called it AIFF) and Microsoft (RIFF).

Apple used the same idea in their Macintosh operating system to identify the application associated with a file ("creator" and "type" codes). I'm not sure if the idea was used in the Lisa, but the original Macs date to about 1982, so the idea was being used at Apple at least that early. (I suspect that the term 'FourCC'--which stands, of course, for "Four Character Code"--may have originated at Apple, but I'm probably wrong about that.)

By the late 1970's, optimized Forth implementations were storing operator names by using a 32-bit value to hold a 1-byte length and the first 3 characters."