brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (06/08/91)
Compressor-heads who are going to Usenix should come visit me and look at my new data compressor. I will have it in booth 509. It runs on DOS and Unix right now, and gives the best compression I know of in any compression product. (Some of the C-W-B/Markov compressors do better but I know of none in production) I am also looking to talk (in person) to people who might help Beta Test and Port to other unix variants. It needs a bit of work before going out fully in this form, although I have run it on SYSV and BSD so far. Anyway, stop by the ClariNet booth and say hello. If you are interested in it but not going to USENIX, I will talk about it more in this group after I get back. Don't mail me until then unless it's urgent. I will also do a WIPS session on the compressor at the conference. This is a complete compressor/archiver for multi-system use which runs at about the speed of PKZIP but compresses a lot better on many files. It is better than ARJ, LHARC or any of the others I have seen out in the DOS world. (And thus, of course, *much* better than LZW compress) One thing I hope people will like is that since it was designed with multiple operating systems in mind, the archive format is portable and extensible, and it supports things like links, symlinks, special files, etc. It also has a text file mapping mode for moving files from OS to OS, and a "combine" mode that compresses small files together for vastly superior compression. (You can still extract individually, it's just a tad slower) It can work as a filter, too. The decompressor is fast, takes little memory and also can decompress .Z files. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473