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Re: The Saltine's Disks Archived at Mac GUI Vault

On 2011-03-01 17:08:29 -0500, Michael J. Mahon said:


Wholly Mindless wrote:

Michael J. Mahon wrote:


I just ask because it would be fun to invent three more formats before
lunch today, since they are so important now that we have megabits per
second of bandwidth and terabytes of storage.  ;-)

Seriously, I can understand it for lossy compression of specialized data
types, like sound, pictures, etc., but have there really been any major
breakthroughs in lossless compression of general binary data?

Sorry for the rant, but this is like inventing new kinds of 115v plugs!



Actually, bzip is pretty old and very compatible with all the unix
derivatives.  Not a brand new magical compression.  Unusual in this case,
but it's how I feel about shk archives when I don't have ciderpress
installed.


Curious, if it existed back in the 1990s, then my old WinZip must be
gagging on some field in the header not much used at the time...

WRT ShrinkIt, it is ".zip for the Apple II"--there is no other
significant archive format for the platform.  (Anyone still remember
BLU?  ;-)
I think I first saw bzip sometime in the mid to late 90s. I remember that at first it was noticably slower than gzip but had much better compression. The goal at that time, when people were still using modems, was certainly improved compression.