Use of a simple hash table mechanism along with ruthless elimination of housekeeping has led to the extremely fast LZRW1 text compression algorithm that requires about 13 machine instructions to compress each byte and about 4 machine instructions to decompress each byte. This results in speeds of about 77K and 250K per second on a one MIP machine. LZRW1 compresses ten percent worse than the popular Unix compress utility, but runs four times faster, making it possibly the fastest adaptive text compression algorithm yet.