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A: San Nicolás, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Oscar Bonello Develops One of the First Practical Data Compression Systems

1983

In 1983 Oscar Bonello, an acoustical engineer at the University of Buenos Aires and founder of Solydyne, began developing the one of the first practical data compression systems, in this case for audio compression in broadcast automation. His starting point was the psychoacoustic principle of the masking of critical bands first published by the German acoustics scientist Eberhard Zwicker in 1967 in his Das Ohr als Nachrichtenempfänger. (The Ear as Message Receiver). From that base, Bonello started developing a practical application based on the recently developed IBM PC. The problems that he faced were: 1) Create an audio PC card of good audio quality; 2) Create a bit compression algorithm; 3) Create the automation software to be run on the PC.

Bonello's broadcast automation system was launched in 1987 under the name Audicom. In 2013 Bonello's compression system was used in all the lossy audio bit compression systems, including MP3, and many radio stations were using similar technology manufactured by a number of companies.

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