Origin
The BASIC programming language was shipped as part of the operating system on the first IBM PCs, Apple and Commodore 8-bit (like Commodore 64/128) computers. On computers that did not start up in BASIC, BASIC was loaded by running a program called an interpreter. The user could then type BASIC commands in "immediate mode" or by creating and/or running a numbered BASIC program within the interpreter.
One of the commands that early BASIC offered was BSAVE (Binary Save) and another (complementary) command was BLOAD (Binary Load). Using the BSAVE command, an addressable area and length of memory could be saved to disk as a named file (referred to as an "Image"). This "Image" of saved memory could then be reloaded from disk into addressable memory later with the BLOAD command. If the BSAVEd image contained program code it could be executed, if data it could be used again, and if the BSAVEd image contained graphics it could be viewed. The video area of memory was addressable.
The PUT and GET commands were used in addition to the BSAVE and BLOAD commands on the IBM PC to allow "clips" of the screen (or the entire screen) to be pre-formatted for BSAVE and BLOAD. These commands added image height and width to the BSAVE format, and were later carried over into the C programming language by some compiler vendors for the MS-DOS platform as the putimage and getimage run-time library functions. PUT and GET allowed display modifier verbs which resembled functions in the Windows Graphical Device Interface (GDI) used by programmers later.
Microsoft evolved and produced the BASIC interpreters that were bundled with the IBM PC, Apple II, and Commodore 128, and included the ability to BSAVE and BLOAD RAM images on all 3 platforms. While it is not clear whether or not Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates originated the BSAVE format they can be clearly credited with providing continued support for the BSAVEd Graphics Image throughout the history of its use by making it accessible to all users of these platforms and by completely documenting its use.
The BSAVE format of that time can be compared to some intents and purposes to the Windows BMP and DIB that came later.
Read more about this topic: BSAVE (graphics Image Format)
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