Did Microsoft Steal Disk Compression? | Nostalgia Nerd

Not to defend Microsoft here, but sounds insane to me at this age an era that there was a time where litigation happened over implementing algorithms in software. I’m glad we are not in that era anymore

i remember receiving a 3,5"-disc lifting my ms-dos to 6.22 (after registering my msdos6-package)… never gotten drivespace (or doublespace for that matter) to run, no free space on my harddrive back then 🙂

They basically stole most of these stuff.. ideas ect

I started with an IBM PC with dual floppy drives. At some point I was visiting Austin, TX and went into a tiny little store in a small strip center, a store called CompuAdd, the only store they had at the time. They offered hard drive kits to add to your PC so I bought one. The 10MB kit was $400, the 20MB kit was $450 so I bought that one and used it for a long time. That begain a stead upgrade in hard drive space that has taken me to 5TB inside my current desktop computer.
You mention PKZip. There were a lot of those different programs available too and spawned big legal battles between the authors. I remember that each new program had to be careful to not use the same verbs as the previous one- how many different words can you use for "compress" for instance. I seem to remember that .ARC was the first one and .LZH was in there too.
I was always leery of doublespace and never used it but of course I had to buy larger hard drives.

Well, actually both M$ and Papple "personal" were thieves in those days, starting with G. and J. and yes, they did not just steal one thing ….

10:47 “1.6:1 ratio” o..oh yea, that’s doubling you know yea yea!!!

i knew it was bs, knowing now how marketing works i would not have bought it knowing its complete bs, and the seller for lying would have gone out of business for lying and nobody would ever deceive consumers again… but alas that’s not what happened and people keep letting these greedy companies lie and mislead to the hilt. well, im not responsible!

if i was a judge i would sew them as much as their false claims stated, so for everything they made i would sew them

It's not just Microsoft – it's the corporate world today – I worked for a successful tech company who developed suites of Security Software and we got bought up by Symantec. Went from wearing a suit to work to having to wear a canary yellow golf shirt. Acquiring intellectual property is the name of the game even if you treat the people who made it like 💩

I like how in Microsoft J++, they had a tool where the executable name was MSZIP and MSunzip. Name awfully similar to PKZIP and PKunzip.

I ran Stacker for years and never had a bad compressed sector. Doublespace on the other hand was slower and less reliable, i have a distinct memory of rebuilding the disk from scratch because the compressed partition had grenaded
By the time I got DOS 6.22 it was 1996, and I just splashed out AUD $500 for a 1.6GB drive and never needed Driveapace. (Yikes that is $1000 in today's money)

file size compression was a main plot of the show "Silicon Valley" in the first season.

Once being a DOS user since 5, I never needed disk compression.

As a child I remember my father having bought Stacker. The software package came with a hardware coprocessor card that had to be installed in order to not hinder the performance of the pc. It worked really well and I remember we doubled our XT's 30 Mb hard drive to around 60 Mb total. I even remember there were some pufferfish stickers that came in the box so that you could show everyone you had Stacker… Great vid!

This is a case where patent infringement was incredibly lucrative to the victim. Hard disk space was increasing so rapidly that the need for compression soon disappeared. And STAC-ing a drive was in practice a one-way operation – by the time the compressed drive was more than half full, it became nearly impossible to un-STAC in realistic time frames. I remember one drive that required nearly 2 weeks to un-STAC.

How it seems -again, more like a story of US firms being nasty, one in a loooong line.

iCAME , iSAW , To Infinite Bytes ♾️ and beyond 🥤😎💻💾

The whole OS was stolen from Gary Kildall initially.

Is there anything in micrsoft that is not stolen?

Or you could just use PKZip.

Funny how we went from chkdsk to scandisk, back to chkdsk