Did Microsoft Steal Disk Compression? | Nostalgia Nerd

They bought it.....

Monopolies destroying companies.
Pure capitalism, where the richest get richer and the poorest get poorer.
Typical of a third world country.

these videos remind me why I use Linux...I mean...I use it now because it's just better...but it reminds me why I switched in the first place and why I hate microsoft.

Dave Plumber touched on this. Stac managed to get a patent on hash tables and as a result got to own 15% of Microsoft.

Jury was wrong; but that's what happens when you don't have software developers on the jury.

Those were the days! My fresh-faced and eager young self had talked a few good-sized law firms and another couple CPA firms into allowing me to be in charge of their IT needs. I was excited as it looked as though my future was set. Indeed, it was set alright. DoubleSpace was but the first of many curses that would plague me over the next twenty years and have me sleeping under desks on office floors rather than my bed most nights. I look back on it now with a bit of nostalgia, a badge of honor even, but I lived in a state of constant hyper vigilance and dread in the knowledge I was only one bad backup or crummy software update away from the combined and focused hostility of a hundred attorneys and their savage secretaries!

thanks for linking the product comparison articles - i really love reading those blasts from the past ;)

40 years has passed

Loved the expanded hard disk.....

Good old days

Man I can’t remember the last time I’d have to back stuff up to another drive just to free up space.

And doing a big system backup to multiple floppies (befor cd burners). If one disk failed, man, the whole backup is trash.

Considering they're currently gorging on Github and Linux, like a terrible Weight Watchers Member, I'd say yes.

Do a video on the QuickTime code theft by Microsoft. They couldn’t play video back in windows without it

Thumbnail: "The Most Disk Space Guaranteed: STACKER" ... and then along came its amphetamine analog younger brother Stacker2...

shiiit microsoft has stolen everything they have lol

It would be shorter to make a video about all the things Microsoft didn't steal.

I ran DR-DOS with SuperStore back then. Much better solution.

Never trust companys!

That little Seattle nerd was a real Machiavellian when he ran Microsoft.

Holy shit was Steve balmer coked out for that commercial or was that actually how he is😂

I remember trying this and wanting to like it but it was toooo slow

kinda binging the old videos now can recommend

Poor Digital Research. Forever Microsoft's punching bag.

I loved Stacker, it never corrupted or lost my files. But I was just a silly nerd with a slow 386 PC. When I upgraded hard disks were more affordable so I never used Stacker again. Fun times!

The articles I read at the time described the interaction between Microsoft and Stac a little differently. It was along the lines of, Microsoft set up a deal and worked with Stac engineers on integrating Stacker more tightly into MS-DOS. A short time later, after seeing the techniques that the Stacker guys were using, Microsoft canceled the deal and used that knowledge to implement DoubleSpace.

I have no inside knowledge of what actually happened. That's just the impression I remember having from the magazine articles of the time

Funny how we went from chkdsk to scandisk, back to chkdsk

- Did Microsoft steal-
- Yes.

Or you could just use PKZip.

Is there anything in micrsoft that is not stolen?

I loved stacker! I actually loved dos 6.0 too. Although I don't think at the time I knew anyone who actually paid for those things. We were just poor school kids.

The whole OS was stolen from Gary Kildall initially.

It stole, swindled, bullied and ripped off so many, this would be pretty much expected behavior and par for the course.

iCAME , iSAW , To Infinite Bytes ♾️ and beyond 🥤😎💻💾

DR DOS pissed all over MS DOS, and had compression software way before it.

How it seems -again, more like a story of US firms being nasty, one in a loooong line.

Does anyone know the first two songs used in the video?

This is a case where patent infringement was incredibly lucrative to the victim. Hard disk space was increasing so rapidly that the need for compression soon disappeared. And STAC-ing a drive was in practice a one-way operation - by the time the compressed drive was more than half full, it became nearly impossible to un-STAC in realistic time frames. I remember one drive that required nearly 2 weeks to un-STAC.

And the mouse...from IBM

As a child I remember my father having bought Stacker. The software package came with a hardware coprocessor card that had to be installed in order to not hinder the performance of the pc. It worked really well and I remember we doubled our XT's 30 Mb hard drive to around 60 Mb total. I even remember there were some pufferfish stickers that came in the box so that you could show everyone you had Stacker... Great vid!

Doublespace and Stacker felt like very different software. Stacker was slower. Doublespace was less effective but faster and more polished. It never felt like they were based on the same code.

Once being a DOS user since 5, I never needed disk compression.

I remember this time period. I looked into using disk compression on my home PC but decided the risk was not worth it.

I used to have sympathy for Stac. Now i find out this was all about a software patent?? Software patents are a pox on the landscape.

Microsoft's solution was smarter than that of Double Disk, let's be honest. Pointers to the original match save even more space than using a unique signature for each repeating part.

file size compression was a main plot of the show "Silicon Valley" in the first season.

My dad worked at Sundog in the 90s and now he works for the company that bought them

I ran Stacker for years and never had a bad compressed sector. Doublespace on the other hand was slower and less reliable, i have a distinct memory of rebuilding the disk from scratch because the compressed partition had grenaded
By the time I got DOS 6.22 it was 1996, and I just splashed out AUD $500 for a 1.6GB drive and never needed Driveapace. (Yikes that is $1000 in today's money)

Wow, a really interesting review! Great work.

I like how in Microsoft J++, they had a tool where the executable name was MSZIP and MSunzip. Name awfully similar to PKZIP and PKunzip.

If Microsoft was near it, they definitely stole it.

It's not just Microsoft - it's the corporate world today - I worked for a successful tech company who developed suites of Security Software and we got bought up by Symantec. Went from wearing a suit to work to having to wear a canary yellow golf shirt. Acquiring intellectual property is the name of the game even if you treat the people who made it like 💩