Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing
Drivespace was what enabled me to play Baldurs Gate 1 back in the day. My specs back then:
wooo, look at mr high end over here :-)
640kb RAM 2 x 512 floppies CGA green screen / monochrome
That wasn't my first PC, just the one on which I played BG1 and used drivespace. My 1st PC was more like the generation after yours. 386 of some sort, 2x 3.5" floppies, and a whooping 43MB harddisk.
Sounds similar to my 2nd. 386SX with 20mb hd. 4mb RAM. She was a beast.
These days, modern filesystem like ZFS has compression and data deduplication (identical data only stored once) support, as well as other useful features such as snapshots and copy-on-write.
The idea is still around! Apple’s APFS file system (and HFS+in its later days) support sort-of transparent compression, and on all its platforms most system files - the ones that don’t change much - are compressed to save space for user files. There’s surprisingly little documentation about this.
There’s a third party tool you can use to compress files yourself: https://github.com/RJVB/afsctool
It looks like the technical details are in this pdf: https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-System-Reference.pdf
Btrfs has compression as well. It compressed my root partition to a third of it's size. It helps out with some games as well, but they usually are not as compressible. The performance impact is pretty minimal as long as you don't set the compression level excessively high.
We used a similar program for Windows 3.11, "doublestack" or something. It did work. It did make it a lot slower. We used it on one of the drives.
Which came first, DriveSpace or Norton Speed Disk? I thought Norton was first.
I believe so yes
Different tools. Speed disk was a disk defragmenter, DriveSpace was whole disk compression. The Norton tool you’d have used a lot if you used DriveSpace was Norton Disk Doctor.
Stacker, then MS ripped off Stacker and made Doublespace, got sued and changed the compression algorithm and renamed it DriveSpace.
Couldn’t use DoubleSpace or Stacker with Windows 3.X, there was no 32bit driver so disk access was horrendously slow. Windows95 was needed to use DriveSpace with full driver support, but it was still slow and by that time hard drives had caught up with the growing size of the OS and applications somewhat and live disk compression lost popularity, particularly with the way DriveSpace did it. Storing your entire drive as a single giant file backed by FAT32 was a terrible idea and prone to corruption.
When NTFS came around and introduced transparent file compression, that pretty much ended DriveSpace style compression. All modern FS now include some kind of compression, NTFS, APFS, BTRFS, ZFS. Even HFS+ had some ability to compress similar to APFS, but wasn’t very well known.
But look at that estimation screen! Again, rant all you wish, Microsoft knew how to handle a long running task even back in MS-DOS days. In this case, it’s estimated at 46 minutes. Great!
Meanwhile, today it's often just "beachball!". It's become a bit of a lost art.
on my old Windows 95 laptop I used the drive compression to create a partition to put some games on it, worked pretty well
