Questions tagged [compression]
Lossless and lossy data compression: algorithms and utilities.
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Get early versions of gzip
According to the ChangeLog file in gzip-1.2.4a.tar.gz, the earliest version of gzip was 0.1 (1992-10-31). Version 1.2.4 (1993-08-18, gzip-1.2.4.tar.gz) is the earliest version I was able to find and ...
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Where does the Unix pack compressor come from?
I'm interested in the history of the Unix pack compression algorithms and their implementation. My questions are:
Who wrote the first, older one? How was it originally distributed, and when and how ...
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Has command.com ever been compressed?
When I compressed command.com of Windows 98 SE with aPACK, it didn't work: the system just hang.
Is (or was) there a way to compress MS-DOS or IBM PC DOS command.com successfully, so that the ...
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What is the format of a DART disk image file?
In the early 1990s, Apple used a utility called the Disk Archive / Retrieval Tool, or DART, to make compressed images of floppy disks. It was superseded by Disk Copy.
Very little information about ...
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Compressing a list of records so it can be uncompressed elementwise [closed]
I have a bunch of lists of generic items (byte sequences) and I would like to store them compressed. There are several tools out there that run on modern computers to compress data into as-small-as-...
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When did HTTP start compressing text?
HTML tends to compress well, typically consisting of text interspersed with repetitive tags. Transparently compressing it for download is a fairly obvious optimization to save bandwidth.
When did Web ...
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What type(s) of compressed files was the MS-DOS EXPAND command able to decompress?
What type(s) of compressed files was the MS-DOS EXPAND command able to decompress?
And what command was its counterpart?
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Disk compression risks in MS-DOS
Continuing my nostalgia reading of Dan Gookin's DOS For Dummies, there is a section that literally advises against compression programs like DriveSpace and calls it a solution to a problem not some ...
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Why was video, audio and picture compression the poorest when storage space was the costliest?
"Full-motion video" sequences in PC and console games in the 1990s were bad-looking, in spite of taking huge amounts of storage space. Same thing with random short video clips that I ...
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What are these compression types in the ARC file format?
The file format of the SEA ARC compression tool, also used by the PKWare PKARC tool, allowed the following compression types:
Packing (RLE encoding)
Squeezing (static Huffman coding)
Crunching (LZW)...
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Was there a compression program based on the Mayne-James algorithm?
Before the advent of Lempel-Ziv family compression algorithms, there was an algorithm for "Information compression by factorising common strings" by A. Mayne and E. B. James (1975), based on ...
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Compression techniques used in old ZX Spectrum tapes
Many ZX Spectrum games* (and demos) would improve loading time and save space in the tape using rudimentary compression. During decompression, the game would display "decrunching" for ...
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What is the origin of executable compression?
According to the wikipedia article on the topic, the earliest executable compressor listed is Realia Spacemaker for IBM PC (since 1982, written by Robert B. K. Dewar, SM.COM, signature "MEMORY$&...
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What data compression did Donkey Kong Country use?
Donkey Kong Country was among the most ambitious, popular and influential of Super Nintendo games. Technically, its big trick was taking animations rendered on Silicon Graphics workstations and ...
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What was the first database to start compressing in situ?
The obvious way for a database to store data is with each record in a contiguous chunk, and each field having a fixed size and offset in the record. Joel Spolsky praises that way of doing things:
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