And it was under development all the back to 1993 or 1998 depending on your opinion. Including image codecs, PNG was 1996. For video codecs, Huffyuv was 2000. (Though to be fair lossless codecs are relatively easier to create, which is why there’s an unnecessarily large variety of them.)
And even lossy video codecs had some OSS experimental developments in the early 2000s that admittedly never went too far - Tarkin predates VP3 open sourcing if you want to count that, and Snow got somewhat decent results if you ignore that H.264 predates it.
And even lossy video codecs had some OSS experimental developments in the early 2000s that admittedly never went too far - Tarkin predates VP3 open sourcing if you want to count that, and Snow got somewhat decent results if you ignore that H.264 predates it.