Did Microsoft Steal Disk Compression? | Nostalgia Nerd

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[amicloud_yt]

"Double your disk size!' uhh pretty sure i've gotten a lot of emails about that

[StringerNews]

I have the actual meeting transcript:
Microsoft: "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
STAC:

[HarpnX]

Not watched video yet but when the title is "Did Microsoft steal..." the answer is almost certainly going to be yes lol

[trafrellik]

I Worked at STAC during the period where the Stacker software was taking off. Yes, it was outright theft, and the writing was on the wall early on. Microsoft would lose the lawsuit but win the war so they made a settlement offer that STAC could not refuse. In the end several executives at STAC came out of it quite rich, but the software side of the company was doomed. Fun little fact: the core product was itself based on the LZ-77 compression algorithm and had a minimal TSR hooked into the disk I/O interrupt. Apart from the 4k sliding buffer needs, not much memory was needed once the TSR was loaded up and hooked in.

The funny part is all the people who thought they could double their disk space when most of their files were already compressed archives, which often required even more space because of differing compression algorithms.

[JavaTP]

"Did Microsoft Steal X?"
the answer to this is pretty much always "Yes", no matter what it is.

[TheSilent]

I used to use Stacker! It was an impressive piece of software! Now that I work as a developer, I can fully appreciate just how awesome it was. Love these kinds of vids! Cheers

[FatNorthernBigot]

PKZIP... Now, there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

[MCPicoli]

Oh, no, you just revived an old trauma and its scars buried deep in my brain. I was the victim of the silent, hidden corruption that happened sometimes when the drives were full or near full. Never used disk compression software again. But yes, I do remember it making the computer slightly faster because of lowered disk access.

[mbpoblet]

Once, back when I was a kid and hard drives were measured in megabytes, I was looking for files to delete because, despite using doublespace (or was it superstor? or drivespace, possibly... I can't really recall), I didn't have enough space for something or other... I was ecstatic when I found a _massive_ hidden file which didn't seem to belong to any program... I wasn't as happy once I lost all my data and had to reinstall everything after deleting it, though... 😓

[loughkb]

As a computer service tech in that era, I absolutely hated Stacker and Doublespace. So many times I had customers lose data when the archive file went corrupt. Once in a great while, we could recover it, but that was rare.
One sector going bad on the hard disk could wipe all your data at once instead of just one file.

[rinsatomi]

Compression wasn't anything new to the software scene. Neither were Microsoft's underhanded practices.

[DeathBringer]

Well, considering both Steve Jobs AND Bill Gates both "borrowed" the concept for having a window-based graphical user interface from visiting Xerox back in the day and seeing what Xerox had already built and were using internally... yea, I wouldn't doubt it if he "borrowed" disk compression from somewhere else too, lol.

[knofi]

Oh, this was always Microsofts game. Embrace, Extend and Extinguish!

[looneyburgmusic]

Growing up a computer-freak in the 70's and 80's I remember this story first hand, and still think it's as crazy today as it was back then. In the early years of the "modern" computer era everyone was stealing everything from everyone else. And that is the single main reason we all managed to go so far with programming so quickly. New software was being developed and released at such an incredible rate that the idea anyone could "own" something such as "disk compression", (or how to engineer a program that would compress a disk), was, just like the concept of a GUI, ridiculous. No one programmer or group of programmers thought up or developed all these different features and software packages - everyone was running full-out building off of, (and on top of), everything that had come before. Some time in the 80's a programmer friend showed our computer club a disk compression program he had written for BASIC of all things. It was simple, and buggy, and amazing all at the same time... Too bad the judges and all the lawyers had no idea about how the things they were fighting over in the courts really worked.

[mzebari]

"Buy him out, boys" - Bill Gates sending his Thugs to rough up Homer.

[gmtnlee]

I'd not thought back to my circa 1993 Stacker drive terminal failure for ages.... A dark moment. But nice whilst it worked. Ooh, that reminds me, must do some backups.

[stephenpointon]

Watford electronics had a type of "on the fly" disk compression on the ADFS system for the BBC micro back in 1982. if I remember it compressed at a ratio of 1.77/1 and still could handle normal disks including the very finicky disk version of elite.

[kattz]

Microsoft was extremely sleazy in the early 90's. WordPerfect was THE word processing software. It ran on DOS up to ver. 5.1 Almost every law office had it because you could create templates and macros to automate the legal documents. In fact, you can still find It running in some law offices today. It is so flexible It can run on an IBM XT with just a couple of MB of RAM right up to the most modern device today. You just need to patch it for x64.

WordPerfect 6.0 was the first Windows based edition. It didn't do anything but crash. It was unusable. MS did something to Windows to prevent it from running properly. They bankrupted WordPerfect because they wanted Word to become the new standard.

MS really was a truly evil company until the US government reigned them in with an abti-trust lawsuit.

[drwolfpoint]

I remember trying the double space option combined with Windows 3, it did not work well. Scandisk is oddly nostalgic to see again. Interesting and Great video.

[lexihaley]

I remember activating dblspace on my parents PC back in the early nineties. I, an almost teenager, was sweating into the late hours, wondering if I'd make a big mistake-but-it worked---but I ultimately chickened out and removed and undid the compression. Parents woke in the morning, none the wiser :)