It’s been quite a while since we last looked at a Computer Chronicles episode, and I thought today would be a good day to rectify this. Today we’re going to take a look at an episode from 1991 involving file compression.
Yes, exciting, I know. In all seriousness it is a somewhat interesting topic – especially when we were limited to floppy discs and relatively small capacity hard disk drives which were very expensive. Compressing files was almost critical and the software to do such was quite a big business back then, as it had been during the BBS days of yore. There were, of course, free options available — some better than others depending on the computer platform you were using, with many using different methods of compressing your data. Still, standard commercial options took hold and helped to guide the industry towards a few standards that certainly were different, but had their benefits and drawbacks. It was up to the end user to decide what option would work best for them though.
The principle was the same, though — finding repetitive data patterns that could be removed, but not “forgotten” by the compressed file, with algorithms filling in the gaps from the compressed file.
This episode of The Computer Chronicles goes into detail on the many many options that were available back in 1991. We cover well known and loved programs like Stuffit and Stacker, as well as a few arguably lesser known products in the data compression industry. We also get a glimpse into the origins of Adobe Premier, a video editing and rendering solution still in use by many today (of course, in a current form — you’d have to be crazy to do that today with the original version of the program) giving us a tangible connection to this otherwise somewhat lost “wild west era” of data compression.
It’s interesting how far the compression industry has come, and yet how little we notice it. Indeed, as good as video looks today, 4K streams on YouTube and the like included, the video is still compressed — sometimes heavily when you compare it to the true original source. Still, that shows how far technology has improved in applications other than file archiving. Of course, the rise of digital music on computers was also a part of the magic of file compression — the legendary MP3 format a direct offshoot, among many other compression codecs used for music and video, all based on the same general idea as the products from nearly 30 years ago.
Anyway, enough out of me. Enjoy the episode. More to come sooner, rather than later, I think.
P.S. If you’re still reading this far and want a bonus video related to Premier 1.0, click here. It’s kind of “Krazy” 🙂