jaw@ames.UUCP (James A. Woods) (04/12/85)
# Press those trousers! -- Roger Ruskin Spear So they're finally hitting the market, eh? Of course, we don't worry, because we do it in software (v.i.z. 'compress'). Long after you have to junk the stat muxes and "accelerators" because 9600 usurps the current rate of 2400 or whatever, USENET's very own code (and that of BSD 4.3, it now seems) will be going strong. If the hardy boys want to find a market in the Unix world, they'll just have to price it a bit lower than the freebie Lempel-Ziv stuff. Don't know about these Telebyte folks, but it's been fun following the Chung modem mystery. The guy used to claim eightfold compression on "random" bits with a "patented" technique, but has toned down a little, and even invokes Shannon theory in his sales literature. Now that Chung Telecommunications in Silicon Valley sells a 2-to-1 stat mux and 2-to-1 compressor in the same box, they have to be a little more circumspect. There was a rather content-free article in Electronic Products recently, which prompted me to phone the author, May Chung. She is vaguely aware of LZ, but won't comment on the pending patent. I'll patiently await reportage in the wonderful and amusing patents column of New Scientist. By the way, the brochures benchmark the thing at 37-54% on text. Sounds like an adaptive method ala LZ, but I doubt that a patent could be issued on an algorithm. David Chung is known mainly as the developer of the Fairchild F8 micro, which harbored one of the ugliest instruction sets known to humankind. When will these hardware types give up? -- James A. Woods (hplabs,ihnp4}!ames!jaw (or, jaw@riacs)