Practical digital cameras were enabled by advances in data compression, due to the impractically high memory and bandwidth requirements of uncompressed images and video. The most important compression algorithm is the discrete cosine transform (DCT), a lossy compression technique that was first proposed by Nasir Ahmed while he was working at the University of Texas in 1972. Practical digital cameras were enabled by DCT-based compression standards, including the H.26x and MPEG video coding standards introduced from 1988 onwards, and the JPEG image compression standard introduced in 1992.