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- From: sheldon@iastate.edu (Steve Sheldon)
- Subject: Re: Compression
- Message-ID: <sheldon.711902145@pv1413.vincent.iastate.edu>
- Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
- Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
- References: <cheungc.711801996@p4.cs.man.ac.uk> <1992Jul23.053515.4271@ringer.cs.utsa.edu>
- Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 14:35:45 GMT
- Lines: 55
-
- In <1992Jul23.053515.4271@ringer.cs.utsa.edu> mjbrown@lonestar.utsa.edu (Marc J. Brown) writes:
-
- >In article <cheungc.711801996@p4.cs.man.ac.uk> cheungc@p4.cs.man.ac.uk (Carson Cheung) writes:
- >>Does anybody know of a program for the Amiga similar to SuperStor and Stacker
- >>on MS-DOS systems which will compress and decompress files 'on the fly'.
-
- >I have heard that the Amiga had "on-the-fly" compression/decompression long
- >before IBMers did (practically a necessity since most Amiga owners have
- >limited ram). I think Imploder does what you're looking for, and I also
- >believe it's PD. [I can understand why you got confused, thinking IBM got
- >there first; I've even heard people tell me that IBMers invented MOD files.]
-
- I never looked at Imploder, but I believe it did the same thing as
- Powerpacker.
- I haven't looked into this, but I believe Powerpacker is essentially similar
- to PKLite on the IBM. That is, it just compresses the executable files so that
- when they are executed they decompress in memory and hopefully work normally.
-
- With the patches you can have the file system do the decompression for you on
- the Amiga, so that these packed files are transparent. This enables you to
- save text files in a packed form, yet still view them with your normal
- utilities.
-
- I believe that Marc Brown may be correct in that I think Powerpacker came
- out for the Amiga before Pklite came out for the MS-DOS machines. But I
- don't think that is important at this stage in the game.
-
- What Carson Cheung wants is something closer to Stacker or Superstor. These
- programs take your entire harddrive partition and compress it. It is
- transparent to the user, as the device driver takes care of all the
- uncompressing and compressing. Unlike Powerpacker, Stacker or Superstor
- always keep the files(or rather partition) in a compressed form, so when
- you save your file back to the harddrive, it will be recompressed.
-
-
- >Here's another interesting tidbit: I have also heard that Stack eats hard-
- >drives for lunch (that is to say, it destroys them utterly and irreversably).
- >I've also talked with several IBM owners who experienced this firsthand
- >(one lost a 70 meg [or something] that had his "life's work" of personal
- >programming, and he is now an Amiga owner :).
-
- This is incorrect. I've been using Superstor for quite some time now, and
- it is a very stable product. It's possible that the early versions of
- Stacker had some problems, but there have been several revisions since.
-
- But, at any rate, I am not aware of anything similar to Superstor for the
- Amiga. It's entirely possible that this could be done. But I don't know
- if the speed would be acceptable on a 68000 based machine. And I'm sure
- the user base would not support the development effort, as there is a
- great deal of beta testing that must be done with a product of this nature.
-
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