Did Microsoft Steal Disk Compression? | Nostalgia Nerd

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Head to www.squarespace.com/nostalgia... to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code NOSTALGIANERD.... I often ask myself; why have I been thinking about DoubleSpace and DriveSpace for almost 30 years. I have no answer. It's why I make these videos. It's why I'm talking today about why Drivespace replaced Doublespacce in Microsoft DOS 6.22, and why Microsoft creating Doublespace actually led to a lawsuit with a company called Stac Electronics. Did Microsoft STEAL their technology? Let's delve in.
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📜 Resources 📜
CompUSA Image: www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/15396...
The Stacker Conspiracy (opinion): grantster.com/2012/06/07/the-...
Product Comparison: books.google.co.uk/books?id=u...
InfoWorld 17 Feb 1992 / Product Reviews: books.google.co.uk/books?id=_...
DOS 6 Benefits (Double Space): books.google.co.uk/books?id=k...
DOS 6 Over-view : books.google.co.uk/books?id=X...
Court Proceedings Timeline (archived): ia803004.us.archive.org/4/ite...
Stac vs Microsoft Text (archived): archive.org/details/STACMS_ZIP
1990 Hard Drive Ad: archive.org/details/PC_Magazi...
Stac Share Price June 1994: books.google.co.uk/books?id=x...
DoubleCheck problems: books.google.co.uk/books?id=8...
Patents: patents.justia.com/assignee/s...
VHS History Stills: vhistory.wordpress.com/2015/0...
DR-DOS 6 Stills: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DR-DOS-6-0...
MS-DOS Promo: • Silly MS-DOS 5 Promo V...
Stac Case Report 28 February 1994: tidbits.com/1994/02/28/stac-w...
Stac Shareholder Lawsuit: caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-ci...
LZF Data Compression ANSI Document: masters.donntu.org/2003/fvti/b...
Stacker: an illustrated Guide (archive): archive.org/details/stackeril...
GeoCities DoubleSpace Overview: www.geocities.ws/politalk/dos/...
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Some material in this video may be used under Fair Dealing / Fair Use. Where under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 (UK: Sections 29 and 30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988), allowance is made for purposes including parody, quotation, criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, education and research. Fair Dealing / Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Комментарии : 1,1 тыс.

@amicloud_yt 3 года назад

"Double your disk size!' uhh pretty sure i've gotten a lot of emails about that

@ReshiLuna 3 года назад

I- lol-

@1sonyzz 3 года назад

change letter 's' to letter 'c' on third word

@JohnyG29 3 года назад

@@1sonyzz You don't have to explain the joke.

@Christopher-N 3 года назад

Look at the results, with just one 3 1/2" pill. They could make a Big Johnson tee shirt with this if they haven't already.

@BDHO73 3 года назад

@@1sonyzz no shit. That was the joke my friend.

@trafrellik7350 3 года назад

I Worked at STAC during the period where the Stacker software was taking off. Yes, it was outright theft, and the writing was on the wall early on. Microsoft would lose the lawsuit but win the war so they made a settlement offer that STAC could not refuse. In the end several executives at STAC came out of it quite rich, but the software side of the company was doomed. Fun little fact: the core product was itself based on the LZ-77 compression algorithm and had a minimal TSR hooked into the disk I/O interrupt. Apart from the 4k sliding buffer needs, not much memory was needed once the TSR was loaded up and hooked in. The funny part is all the people who thought they could double their disk space when most of their files were already compressed archives, which often required even more space because of differing compression algorithms.

@titactaco 3 года назад

Patent infringement is not theft and software patents are a cancer on the world.

@mgzukows 3 года назад

@@titactaco Generic Software Parents are cancer. Specific patients make advancement possible. Patient infringement is absolutely theft. You are taking something that someone else spent a lot of man hours developing. All for free.

@jackkraken3888 3 года назад

I have to agree with "I am using a computer" Patent Infringement isn't theft especially software based ones where as the video noted was very common and not as novel as STAC was trying to convey.

@mgzukows 3 года назад

@@jackkraken3888 It's as much theft as not paying a tradesman for his work.

@Ehal256 3 года назад

@@mgzukows I have a feeling that STAC did not invent the LZ77 compression algorithm..

@StringerNews1 3 года назад

I have the actual meeting transcript: Microsoft: "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." STAC: "AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!"

@matthewrease2376 3 года назад

Holy shit, Microsoft really is the Borg aren't they...

@loughkb 3 года назад

As a computer service tech in that era, I absolutely hated Stacker and Doublespace. So many times I had customers lose data when the archive file went corrupt. Once in a great while, we could recover it, but that was rare. One sector going bad on the hard disk could wipe all your data at once instead of just one file.

@christoffer4862 3 года назад

Compression does not replace backups... I am positive any lost data would have disappeared anyway without compression.

@BuckyOhYeah 3 года назад

@@christoffer4862 I'd guess OP understands: archiving != backup. To fight your side, he didn't say corrupt... though I do infer that from his comment. I expect the corruption was likely due to the same as nearly all corruption / read issues I recall from that era; limited knowledge of the system hardware, combined with fewer api (as it's called now) routes/less access to system level data, e.g. dynamic hd space data was only added in 98 I believe. I remember VBscripting for 95, and having to poll every time...

@fffUUUUUU 3 года назад

Wrong. One bad sector affects one file. If it was in root dir - it would be the same even without stacker/doublespace.

@fffUUUUUU 3 года назад

@r4rev2 wrong

@fffUUUUUU 3 года назад

False memories. Stacker compress files on a cluster by cluster basis

@MCPicoli 3 года назад

Oh, no, you just revived an old trauma and its scars buried deep in my brain. I was the victim of the silent, hidden corruption that happened sometimes when the drives were full or near full. Never used disk compression software again. But yes, I do remember it making the computer slightly faster because of lowered disk access.

@bigfairy321 3 года назад

im scarred for life too

@orangejjay Год назад

Same here. Never forget. Never again.

@FatNorthernBigot 3 года назад

PKZIP... Now, there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

@eval_is_evil 3 года назад

Oh wow I remember that ,that's so ancient . Now I'm sad because I feel old. I also remember the first days of cd piracy. Some pirates used the Joliet file system and somehow didnt work on normal CD readers. Allegedly. I never tried I swear 😏

@SlavicCelery 3 года назад

Use PKZIP to open up that latest copy of Winamp (It really kicks the llama's ass). That way you can listen to some sweet Sugar Ray tunes while chatting up your friends on ICQ/AIM. *Did I hit enough nostalgia points on that one?*

@FatNorthernBigot 3 года назад

@@SlavicCelery I'm even older than that... Us Genx-ers were adapters. The online world was thrust upon us. Nothing was taken for granted. Having said that, I used MSN messenger.

@GarwoodNick 3 года назад

@@SlavicCelery yes sir, lots of nostalgia there. But winamp whips the llamas ass.

@SlavicCelery 3 года назад

@@FatNorthernBigot Oh I could have went back further, but it usually shoots further back than most people were involved with computers. Personally, the best Shell program for interacting with MSDOS was Norton Commander.

@mbpoblet 3 года назад

Once, back when I was a kid and hard drives were measured in megabytes, I was looking for files to delete because, despite using doublespace (or was it superstor? or drivespace, possibly... I can't really recall), I didn't have enough space for something or other... I was ecstatic when I found a _massive_ hidden file which didn't seem to belong to any program... I wasn't as happy once I lost all my data and had to reinstall everything after deleting it, though... 😓

@looneyburgmusic 3 года назад

Growing up a computer-freak in the 70's and 80's I remember this story first hand, and still think it's as crazy today as it was back then. In the early years of the "modern" computer era everyone was stealing everything from everyone else. And that is the single main reason we all managed to go so far with programming so quickly. New software was being developed and released at such an incredible rate that the idea anyone could "own" something such as "disk compression", (or how to engineer a program that would compress a disk), was, just like the concept of a GUI, ridiculous. No one programmer or group of programmers thought up or developed all these different features and software packages - everyone was running full-out building off of, (and on top of), everything that had come before. Some time in the 80's a programmer friend showed our computer club a disk compression program he had written for BASIC of all things. It was simple, and buggy, and amazing all at the same time... Too bad the judges and all the lawyers had no idea about how the things they were fighting over in the courts really worked.

@DustinDustin00 Год назад

And any encryption was classified as munitions and you did NOT want to export that out of the US or the feds could go after you! Fun times!

@JavaTP 3 года назад

"Did Microsoft Steal X?" the answer to this is pretty much always "Yes", no matter what it is.

@zenkim6709 Год назад

Yeah, I still find it amusing that Bill Gates wrote a scathing letter to the Homebrew Computer Club in which he flatly stated "You steal your software" after finding out that they'd ... ahem ... *acquired* copies of Microsoft's Altair BASIC interpreter (bugs & all) w/o paying anything ...only to later get hauled into court when it was discovered that Microsoft had outright stolen code from Apple's QuickTime software & brazenly incorporated it into its competing software @ the time -- Microsoft Video for Windows. Oh, the irony....

@mzebari 3 года назад

"Buy him out, boys" - Bill Gates sending his Thugs to rough up Homer.

@kbm2055 3 года назад

"I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks" - Bill Gates

@TheSilent333 3 года назад

I used to use Stacker! It was an impressive piece of software! Now that I work as a developer, I can fully appreciate just how awesome it was. Love these kinds of vids! Cheers

@medes5597 3 года назад

My dad still users stacker on his word processing machine. It's surprisingly powerful and versitile.

@vnaum 3 года назад

You could fit WHOLE Eye of the Beholder 1 game on a single 3.5" floppy! No disk-swapping! Thanks, STAC!

@sladewilson9741 2 года назад

Me too! Was wonderful for my college laptop.

@rinsatomi9527 3 года назад

Compression wasn't anything new to the software scene. Neither were Microsoft's underhanded practices.

@jimmio3727 2 года назад

Microsoft? Underhanded? You mean like... making money off your start bar searches in Windows 10?

@fordgtguy Год назад

@@jimmio3727 Like literally almost all companies that collect search data?

@g0mtnlee 3 года назад

I'd not thought back to my circa 1993 Stacker drive terminal failure for ages.... A dark moment. But nice whilst it worked. Ooh, that reminds me, must do some backups.

@DeathBringer769 3 года назад

Well, considering both Steve Jobs AND Bill Gates both "borrowed" the concept for having a window-based graphical user interface from visiting Xerox back in the day and seeing what Xerox had already built and were using internally... yea, I wouldn't doubt it if he "borrowed" disk compression from somewhere else too, lol.

@rodmunch69 3 года назад

Wow, really? I never heard that before. Thanks for sharing your amazing insight and story telling with the world, now everyone will know about this previously undiscovered information.

@dacsus 3 года назад

@@rodmunch69 Where exactly did he claim that the information was new?

@rodmunch69 3 года назад

@@dacsus standing up for your boyfriend, good for you.

@dacsus 3 года назад

@@rodmunch69 So, first you will come up with one fallacy, and then with another one - good for you.

@rodmunch69 3 года назад

@@dacsus can never please you fruits.

@knofi7052 3 года назад

Oh, this was always Microsofts game. Embrace, Extend and Extinguish!

@BenLJackson 3 года назад

Like when they bought Homer's CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet!

@thehaigu321 3 года назад

They're trying to do it with Linux now, so uh oh

@MirekFe 3 года назад

@@thehaigu321 Well there's always Temple OS if the switch is required 😂

@MirekFe 3 года назад

@Jean-Simon Chénard Why?

@PhirePhlame 3 года назад

@@thehaigu321 1.) We're now over 20 years removed from that heyday. 2.) Linux is quickly becoming the industry baseline anyway.

@lexihaley2887 3 года назад

I remember activating dblspace on my parents PC back in the early nineties. I, an almost teenager, was sweating into the late hours, wondering if I'd make a big mistake-but-it worked---but I ultimately chickened out and removed and undid the compression. Parents woke in the morning, none the wiser :)

@trafficjon400 2 года назад

This wake did they change?

@Harp00nX 3 года назад

Not watched video yet but when the title is "Did Microsoft steal..." the answer is almost certainly going to be yes lol

@carlospulpo4205 3 года назад

The original patent has a problem in that is has the phrase " including circuit means operable " in the one and only independent patent claim. This restricts the patent to implementation in hardware due to the circuit citation. "means for" language in the only independent claim may lead to other restrictions. Although the fact the software implementation runs in the computer could be called a "circuit" , however I believe the spirit of the original patent was to protect the IP relating to the hardware based card that was the original product. I am surprised Microsoft lost, however the courts are more knowledgeable of software and hardware now.

@colto2312 3 года назад

Are they really though :) the facebook situation begs to differ. More knowledgeable yes, but far from the modern era

@stephenpointon 3 года назад

Watford electronics had a type of "on the fly" disk compression on the ADFS system for the BBC micro back in 1982. if I remember it compressed at a ratio of 1.77/1 and still could handle normal disks including the very finicky disk version of elite.

@mrcyberpunk 3 года назад

I see the digital research logo and immediately its like "here we go again". RIP Gary Kildall.

@deeiks12 3 года назад

I remember getting a pirated copy of stacker in the early 90s and somehow making my hard drive unusable, had to low level format it to get it working again. Good old days. Thanks for bringing it up.

@JayMaverick 3 года назад

Holy crap I remember "doubling my diskspace" in the old days. It worked to an extend, but completely screwed up the available space indicator. There was also some practical issues that made it a headache to use, I can't remember if it was corrupting data or destroying the disk.

@jari2018 3 года назад

same experience

@stargazer7644 Год назад

It didn't really screw up the available space indicator. You can never predict with certainty how much free space you have on a compressed disk. The problem is, your available space depends on what the compression ratio will be of data that you haven't written to it yet. The thing can't predict the future. So they just guessed that you'd get 2:1 compression, and doubled however much actual free space you had. Whether you got that or not depended on what kind of data you eventually actually wrote to it. It's like asking someone how much data you can put into a 1GB zip file. That depends entirely on what kind of data you put in it.

@zdanee 3 года назад

Ah yes, the 90-ies, the last time the justice system could get any hold on software giants...

@rodmunch69 3 года назад

Yeah, because the consumer market was totally going to take off like it did when you're paying $50 for Netscape Gold and $80 for Winzip...

@gram. 3 года назад

Ninetyies

@stargazer7644 3 года назад

I have never in my life heard someone call it the 90-ies

@salis-salis 3 года назад

This whole vid could be made up and I probably wouldn't know the difference...

@magmajctaz1405 3 года назад

Yeah. I was certain MS had actually stolen Stac Electronics software. I thought they had entered into a partnership, then MS dissolved it, taking what they stole from Stac.

@magmajctaz1405 3 года назад

Quick search found grantster.com/2012/06/07/the-stacker-conspiracy/. One commentor claims he worked for Stac, and he claims a comparison of source code was done, and it contained Stac copyrights within it. I'd heard this too, back in the 90s. Either the commentor is lying, having heard the same rumors I had over 20 years ago, or he's legitimate.

@ElsinoreRacer 3 года назад

@@magmajctaz1405 I had heard that version too, at the time. I was lightly connected with the OS/2 version of Stacker.

@xponen 3 года назад

@@magmajctaz1405 what about "DoubleDisk", did anyone back then realise that "DoubleSpace" is made by people who made "DoubleDisk"?

@rodmunch69 3 года назад

The British always claim they invented everything and some evil foreigner stole it from them.

@theJellyjoker 3 года назад

Last time I was this early, Seattle Computer Systems still owned DOS!

@retrojacksgamingtunes2459 3 года назад

@Dr ROLFCOPTER! r/whooosh

@JonManProductions 3 года назад

The intro is just 30 seconds of Nerd staring intensely into the camera before speaking to get the time space needed for the title graphics to roll through.

@CTCTraining1 3 года назад

That’s acting ... it was also a thing in the 80’s I believe.

@Netsuko 3 года назад

Him and LGR seem to do the exact same thing... now.. who came up with it first!

@sailaab 3 года назад

Chris.. exactly!

@80s_Gamr 3 года назад

So?

@DustinRodriguez1_0 3 года назад

Great video! I was always curious about disk compression, but even today I don't use it because I know it takes a toll, however small, on performance. Plus, especially now, the large share of my disk space is taken up by already-compressed data that would not benefit at all, and might even be increased in size, by any attempts at further compression. I paid a lot of attention to tech news at the time all this was happening, but with this mostly being pre-Internet stuff, my ability to do so was pretty limited as a teen. I do remember a very excellent summary of how Huffman compression worked being in Computer Shopper one time, though. I tore it out and kept it in my wallet for years. Data compression has always been a very interesting topic to me, and I still read about it from time to time and intend to implement fractal compression now that its patents are all expired when I get around to it for video to play with, so this video was right up my alley!

@csx296 3 года назад

Thanks for these videos I love them. I was very much into computers back in these early days but too young to care/follow all these details. Now I find it fascinating to learn what was going on behind the scenes! Keep up the good work :D

@antonnym214 3 года назад

Did they steal? No, but they weren't angels, either. Then they paid up ONLY after getting caught. Great video! I remember those days and being confused by the various names for compression schemes.

@manuell3505 3 года назад

It was actually a bit fake. Combining a compression algoritm with a filesystem interface doesn't make a new product.

@DM0407 3 года назад

Ask for forgiveness not permission.

@Run187 3 года назад

Yeah, they stole windows from xerox..

@antonnym214 3 года назад

@@Run187 Not exactly. They stole Windows from Apple, who stole the graphical user interface and mouse from Xerox at the Palo Alto Research Center.

@chevon5707 3 года назад

Anton Nym Apple paid Xerox - they didn’t steal anything. Xerox had no plans to make a consumer-level personal computer at PARC.

@drwolfpoint 3 года назад

I remember trying the double space option combined with Windows 3, it did not work well. Scandisk is oddly nostalgic to see again. Interesting and Great video.

@Mmmm_tea 3 года назад

friends 486 laptop with a whopping 80mb hard drive installing with drive compression taking about 3 hours, think compression was the only way to get enough drive space to make the install fit! #goodtimes

@calebland6246 3 года назад

And then a few years later disks would balloon in size and all this would be unnecessary. What a crazy time in computing. I was a Mac user when this was going down and only got a windows machine after DOS 6.22 was released.

@henke37 3 года назад

Yet, NTFS still supports file compression.

@jmlemmi 3 года назад

@@henke37 and the NTFS compression as well as compactOS.exe are still widely used on Laptops. Processing power is abundant nowadays, but SSD space is still expensive.

@bluephreakr 3 года назад

@@jmlemmi SSDs will get to where hard disks are today. _Then what?_ The only way up from there is vertical NAND and speed, and I think that'll do it unless we can perfect some weird DNA-in-a-crystal tech and create eternally-living bio-data.

@jmtrad1906 3 года назад

Still a nice option to have. Small SSDs still exist and will be here for at least a decade if they want to popularize because majority of the planet don't receive that much money.

@Lucius_Chiaraviglio 3 года назад

@@Nighterlev Tape can be rewritten. Write-once examples would be CD-R or DVD-R or DVD+R (or back in older days, PROM, or back in even older days, although with some overlap, punched cards and paper tape).

@sinn-zj3kk 3 года назад

I remember everyone having hard drives that typically peaked at 100Mb of space. When companies started offering 1Gb of space people thought that was just massive. There was no way in Hell we would ever fill up that much space! Now our consoles come with 1Tb SSD's (well starting tomorrow) and that won't be enough for most average users.

@fwingebritson 3 года назад

I hated disk compression as hard drives were very fragile at the time and thrashing them to an early death did not seem to be worth the "savings" they offered up front. Take any hard drive from the "glory days" and those that still work likely had not been subject to the hell of disk compression. Proof? Load any type of disk compression utility on an older computer and watch that hdd light flash faster than a strobe light at a disco.

@TurboWindex 3 года назад

Lulw

@schnittmagier5515 3 года назад

I do not recall the details since I was young and it is decades ago. But I still recall the Memo to myself to "never use any Type of disk doubler again". It was not worth the problems that it was creating.

@mcorrade 3 года назад

I remember that nightmarish double space/Stacker software and I can't tell you how many drives were toast because of it. People lost tons of data because of it and I always recommended to my clients to NEVER use that software. But, I would inevitably get the call from some old goat who thought he found the fountain of youth and before I could say NOOOOOOOO it was too late lololololo

@jeffteza682 3 года назад

I knew Gary Clow during those days and an interesting twist was that Art Collmeyer a Stac board member received Microsoft and the board hadn't really discussed what they wanted from Microsoft, so he "threw out" the 43x $1M/month and the $39.9M investment. He didn't think MS would accept but they just said "OK"! Art was on the board of a company I ran called Syntricity.

@JohnDlugosz 3 года назад

Closing remarks on WIndows 10: The compression built-in to NTFS (almost from the beginning, making it contemporary with the events of the story long before NT became just "Windows") is not as good at compressing, I noted at the time. There's also an issue with how NTFS manages sectors in groups of 16 I discovered later, meaning that files tended to leave gaps of unused space after them, and defragmenting did the same thing! My own efforts to remove these "interstices" pointed to an effect where after writing to a span of sectors (such as by the defragmentor) the following sectors (rounded up to a multiple of 16) remained locked for some time so that the next file-relocation issued by the defragmentor would have to skip them. This is in contrast to one of the features of DBLSPACE, which was to _eliminate_ cluster-size bloating. (In FAT, files are tracked in allocation units much larger than a sector, and increasing this was a way to cope with larger disks leading up to FAT32.)

@CameronHuff 3 года назад

I remember running Stacker back in the day. couldn't do images very well, but anything else it worked great on. Also people might have warm fuzzies for Microsoft these days, but those of us that dealt with them in the 90s know better.

@DailyCorvid 2 года назад

Microsoft are universally hated, and separately so is Billy Gates and his weirdo cultist misses!

@Mr_Top_Hat_Jones 3 года назад

You’re doing the lord’s work, Peter, my god. These are the absolute best videos. I’ll watch this about 3 times, I’m sure. Thanks for all of the content, and all of that sweet sweet nostalgia.

@Riz_ 3 года назад

The effort and research that goes into your videos Nostalgia nerd always astounds me. I love what you are doing, please keep it up. As a former IT student I honestly feel these videos should be compulsory viewing for current IT studants.

@kattz753 3 года назад

Microsoft was extremely sleazy in the early 90's. WordPerfect was THE word processing software. It ran on DOS up to ver. 5.1 Almost every law office had it because you could create templates and macros to automate the legal documents. In fact, you can still find It running in some law offices today. It is so flexible It can run on an IBM XT with just a couple of MB of RAM right up to the most modern device today. You just need to patch it for x64. WordPerfect 6.0 was the first Windows based edition. It didn't do anything but crash. It was unusable. MS did something to Windows to prevent it from running properly. They bankrupted WordPerfect because they wanted Word to become the new standard. MS really was a truly evil company until the US government reigned them in with an abti-trust lawsuit.

@AchmadBadra 3 года назад

And rightnow google trying mimic it lol

@kstricl 3 года назад

I remember optimizing PCs in those times, I rarely enabled dblspace and drvspace on customer computers, as most of them were business machines that couldn't afford the loss. I also remember that I did experience loss of file performance to a degree that once I had enough HD space to live without compression, I removed it. I also remember 6.22 as the absolute best version of DOS before Windows 95 and became quite adept at optimizing load order of drivers into Upper Memory Blocks.

@JohnDlugosz 3 года назад

As pointed out in the video, there was a period where using Stacker was _faster_ than not. CPUs were getting faster rapidly, while consumer-grade drives were still dog slow. Decompressing was easily faster than reading. I remember using SCSI drives at home, at least for the main system drive, because they were faster. IIRC, I'm taking 5 Mbytes/second. The speed was limited by the arial density and rotation rate, and started to climb as hard drives got larger: more bytes going past the head in the same 1 revolution. I recall that was still true for Windows 3.1 machines running on 486 CPUs, up to the time DOS 6 came out including their own DBLSPACE.

@JimLeonard 3 года назад

Very well researched! (Now I don't have to cover the history when I go into compression hardware products such as Stacker XT/8, AT/16, Expanz! and ddtrans)

@MrSergione1978 3 года назад

I don't think you used the same algorithm to decompress video on the fly on 8088 domination. That one and 8088mph are my favourite demos ever!

@JimLeonard 3 года назад

@@MrSergione1978 Thanks :-) Correct, there is actually very little decompression for speed reasons.

@UXXV 3 года назад

Loved it! Great video and I remember all this when it happened. There was a shareware program called Diet that "kinda" did the same thing before too, it would work on the file level and intercept read and write commands using a TSR

@cbarger2327 3 года назад

I don't recall anyone thinking Stacker made drives faster back in the day. Before I installed it, everyone I knew warned me that it would make my drive slower. Once I started using it I didn't really notice a difference in disk speed either way. However, I disliked the way the size of the drive / amount of free space would change constantly based on compression quality (making it hard to estimate if I had room to install things), and ultimately ended up removing it and using ZIP to compress stuff that I wasn't using.

@ElsinoreRacer 3 года назад

It was true. Long story but we had a big need (in multiples) and tested before committing. Mid 486 era, just after the the DX-4 came out. Overnight clock speed tripled on the same (usually) platform, but HD speeds and buses, already behind, were now absolutely the choke point. It was faster to use all that DX4 goodness to compress and decompress on the processor side of the the small orifice the HD system represented. Didn't last long. 4-5 years?

@jayextarys8616 3 года назад

I never heard about your channel and now I can't stop watching your videos. Good job mate! 🥰

@AndySmallbone 3 года назад

My absolute favourite version of Dos 6 was v6.21 which is the one that never went into retail but was supplied to OEMs and which I got when working at Amstrad in the 90s. It was produced because of the double space fiasco and had that all ripped out of it. It was the best version for all the latest enhancements of dos but also the most amount of base memory for dos games 😂 which I still had copies of it now just for nostalgia purposes.

@retroguy4139 3 года назад

6.21 was my last dos back in the day. No disk compression ment more disk space if you don't choose to compress it.

@bchristian85 Год назад

That's cool you had 6.21. I always heard about it but never knew anyone who had it. Most people had 6.20 or 6.22.

@djmoch1001 3 года назад

While searching the web about hard drive history, I was surprised that the first hard drive to break the 1GB barrier was created as early as 1980. Though by no means portable, it was one of those industrial size things (cabinet and drive weighed about 550lbs / 250kg total, that's freaking titanic!) That was interesting to discover. Also to realize that within several decades, we've gone from 10MB hard drives to 10+ TB hard drives. Another web search led me to the current largest drive available being 16TB in size. Technology never ceases to amaze me.

@looneyburgmusic 3 года назад

Living through those days was even more amazing... "My" first computer, (that I paid for myself), had a 100MB hdd... then I bought a computer that had a 320MB drive that lasted me for years, until my then g/f bought me a 5GB drive as a gift. I had zero idea what I would use 5GB for - it seemed like an impossible amount of space to fill. Today, my main computer has 8 drives, combined total storage just under 15TB, and I'm running out of room... again...

@Johan-ez5wo 3 года назад

@@looneyburgmusic spoiled!, my first HD was 5 mb

@m9078jk3 3 года назад

I prefer MS-DOS 6.2 to MS-DOS 6.22 because I often get more conventional memory for DOS Games. One PC game that required an enormous amount of conventional memory was Tornado by Digital Integration which was a PC combat flight simulator.

@goodiesguy 3 года назад

It's 5AM, I needed something to watch, and this arrived!

@edisonfirmin3319 3 года назад

6pm in the uk, perfectly timed for my dinner

@randomlyJohnson 3 года назад

2:17 in the maryland

@HGAMES69 3 года назад

1:57AM in Pakistan.

@musteycraft 3 года назад

Its 23:01 in germany Or 11:01PM

@DM0407 3 года назад

Did 1990's Microsoft steal or illegally drive out of business "insert product here"? Yes.

@mrkitty777 3 года назад

George Bush gave Gates diplomatic immunity, so now it's legal.

@DS9TREK 3 года назад

@@mrkitty777 Americans can't have diplomatic immunity within the US.

@TheBrainSquared 3 года назад

The term was Extend, Embrace, Extinguish

@mrkitty777 3 года назад

Embrace extend extinguish exterminate, due to the high death rate among competition like the suicide of Linux Debian founder Ian Murdock or Google executive Timothy Hayes or netscape programmers hearing their family would be ... Steve Ballmer bragged about burrying people probably Steve was doing cocain again. The monkey dance videos show Ballmer under heavy influence that's obviously not ritalin.

@mrkitty777 3 года назад

Bill Gates can travel to India because of his diplomatic immunity. Without it he would be incarnated, India, where the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and their vaccine empire are under fire, including a pending lawsuit currently being investigated by the India Supreme Court. Narayana Kumar of The Economic Times of India has just written a scathing report of fraud and scandals surrounding the Gates vaccine empire: Controversial vaccine studies: Why is Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under fire from critics in India? Kumar starts out his 4 page article by focusing on the current case before the India Supreme Court regarding deaths and injuries occurring during drug trials carried out over Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil. Vaccine trials were conducted on thousands of girls between the ages of 9 and 15. Many of the girls fell ill, and at least 7 died, and the lawsuit is alleging that in most of these cases, the girls and their parents did not even know what kind of vaccine trial they were participating in.

@rudolfabelin383 3 года назад

You made me nostalgic! I was there. To some part.... with the early disk compresion on DOS. I shifted my production to Windows NT early in 1993. Yes, you read correctly. But that is another story. Curious I am, (Yoda) what disk compression was used in Windows NT. I have over the years used it in 1000th of systems including mission critical servers. At best, like with Ansys matrix files (they can be HUGE) the compression factor is 90%. With a jpg - forget it!! Oh, I met Gates in Stockholm early 1994. Thanks for a highly interesting episode!!!!!!!!!!!!

@lukefreeman828 3 года назад

I’m too young to remember anything from this era (I’m a ‘93 baby introduced to the PC via Windows 98) - but it sure is fun learning about it all 😀

@jari2018 3 года назад

Get a windows 95 old computer with the win 95 cd -on that os you can install anything and it wont -tell you cant , you maybe cant since the os crashes and you have to reinstall win 95 , Some soundcards like sound blaster gold are still superior to new ones .You also have drivespace you can use -and internet explorer are not incorporated in the os -you can install 3.0 a buggy ie 4 ,a buggy 5.0 or a working ie 5.5 -there are tons of old cd from magazines with utilites and games .And you can remove system 32 within windows -It wont budge and then your computer freezes

@monkeywithocd 3 года назад

Though I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft's business practices, it's complete BS that STAC won that lawsuit, at least based on the information given in this video.

@JohnDlugosz 3 года назад

Yea, they ruled against MS because they saw them as bullying during the trial. Instead of fighting the patent saying "that was for a hardware card" or saying, "OK, we'll change the implementation slightly so it follows this 1979 paper published in the ACM instead" they just said "we're expensive laywers and we'll play that game". BTW, wasn't there also a plagiarism claim involved too, where some of stac's code appeared to be present?

@trafrellik7350 3 года назад

@@JohnDlugosz it was more than just the hardware card though, the software code was also explicitly licensed by the original author, and they demonstrated commercial precedent along with the licensing. The patent was mostly to demonstrate the link between the algorithm and the hardware which was later implemented in software. Too complex for me to fully understand, but chunks of the actual stacker code were found in the Microsoft product, meaning that their purchase of the competitor software was not a full answer to the infringement claim. Sure, the bullying was likely to be the final straw, but there was substance to the claim.

@grilledflatbread4692 3 года назад

Doublespace was really buggy and not as stable as stacker.

@looneyburgmusic 3 года назад

Stacker was far from perfect either... All the big disk compression programs had issues back then...

@kattz753 3 года назад

Yeah, it was quite easy to corrupt your whole disk. But we took the chance a lot of the time because hard drives were so expensive. I found a receipt for a 240 MB (not GB) drive not long ago it was $200. You could buy a crappy but driveable used car for that price back then.

@MajinErick 3 года назад

The Microsoft Store sells Doublespace. I remember that it became ZipMagic after DoubleSpace 3.

@grilledflatbread4692 3 года назад

@@looneyburgmusic You're probably right and both managed to corrupt my disk.

@Bacon420 3 года назад

I got a 286 PC with MSDOS 5.0... 40MB was tough with all the games you could get on BBSes..and all that 8-bit porn... I got a package from the manufacturer (Austin PC) with MSDOS 6.0 disks, and I doublespaced my drive....and suddenly everything was slower than the usual slow! After a week I had corrupted it somehow, and had to FDISK it back to the start, without compression. SCANDISK was the nightmare...one red B would turn to two, and tey would multiply like the game of Life until the disk ground to a halt.

@vespasian606 3 года назад

I used Stacker for a while but you had to be careful. A friend managed to configure it to compress the OS. Which was fine but when his drive crashed he couldn't recover any of the data. Never trusted any of the other offerings and certainly not something "bundled" with MSDOS. We still remembered the buggy mess that was MSDOS 4.

@Bacon420 3 года назад

@@vespasian606 oh wow, never saw 4... went from 3.3 to 5!

@rickyyoung 3 года назад

I ran Scandisk on a Novell Printer server once....My Boss didn't like that. Serves him right for taking unannounced unbooked holiday really

@GiuseppeGaetanoSabatelli 3 года назад

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

@Vednier 3 года назад

In short, Microsoft always was "elephant in china store" - rudely kicking out "competitors" out of business, using unfair strategies and so on.

@ckingpro 3 года назад

Except in this case, it was a case of patent trolling as using hashing was a basic technique and the patent shouldn't have even be approved.

@TheJunky228 3 года назад

that's the strategy of every business that has grown large like they have....guess it works sadly

@looneyburgmusic 3 года назад

And today the role of Microsoft has been taken on by Apple. And Apple has ramped up kicking out the competition to a whole new level of stupidity.

@Vednier 3 года назад

@@ckingpro Well, maybe it was patent trolling in some way, but it was rather "right" use of patents. Its no fair when OS vendor can simply look at your invention, copy and bundle with OS. Obviously this will force you out of business. MS always did it, story of bundling IE with Windows is same. And look, Stacker actually produced real goods - software, unlike nowadays patent troll which dont produce anything except false claims.

@Vednier 3 года назад

@@looneyburgmusic On desktop - probably yes. Apple simply ripping of their customers in any way possible. Not only their products is expensive they stupidly hard to fix and repair. I highly recommend to look Louis Rossmann channel on RU-vid, he is pal which have "unlicensed" repair store and he knows how Apple stuff working for real. In Web role of MS was taken by Google - its pushing Chrome everywhere, inventing his own standards and (in case standard already exists) "special" interpretations of them which doesnt compatible with anything else. Sadly, history repeats itself.

@gstcomputing65 3 года назад

I wrote about this on my blog many years ago. To my amazement, someone who (purportedly) worked for Stac wrote a response. I don't think they got all of the facts right, but it was interesting to see. I've added the response just in case anyone is interested. I worked for STAC Electronics during the time of the Microsoft lawsuit. The software engineers at STAC Electronics showed a bunch of us employees the source code from both DoubleSpace and Stacker 1.0 side-by-side. They were identical. Microsoft didn’t even bother to remove the STAC Electronics Copyright notices embedded into the source code.

@spikey2740 3 года назад

Is anyone surprised? I'm not.

@looneyburgmusic 3 года назад

Because no-one has ever lied on the Internet, especially the MS/Bill Gates haters, who still like to lie to each other about Gates saying, "640k is enough for anybody"...

@spikey2740 3 года назад

@@looneyburgmusic ... no-one has ever lied on the Internet, especially the MS/Bill Gates haters ... We know of many shenanigans they pulled or got by with simply because nobody was rich enough to stop them in court or elsewhere. And I'll bet a dollar against a donut there were lots of other things that slipped by because nobody had the technical expertise to know what was happening behind the scenes. But at the time 640K was a hell of a lot of memory, and probably was sufficient for most situations.

@BilisNegra 3 года назад

The kind of informed, amazing tech history that made you stand out in the first place. I have a smile on my face. Thanks for the trip (and letting me know.among so many other things, where that weird but very familiar version number, DOS 6.22, came from).

@noferblatz 3 года назад

This is Microsoft at its essence. I was around when this happened, and got off the Microsoft train as soon as I was able (Linux). I've told people for years that Microsoft is a very evil corporation, but they don't listen or don't care. Apple's damn near as bad, but in a different way.

@wahyutriwibowo1803 3 года назад

And now Google/Alphabet become new scummy MSFT

@LaskyLabs 3 года назад

@@wahyutriwibowo1803 well hey at least Google doesn't make a super popular os! Oh... Nevermind... But hey, at least Android is open source. Suck it Microsoft.

@wahyutriwibowo1803 3 года назад

@@LaskyLabs Android is almost closed source as Windows or Mac.

@NormanTheDormantDoormat 3 года назад

And today MS is leaning more and more towards being a "good guy", or at least neutral guy with the occasional good deed.

@looneyburgmusic 3 года назад

MS bad was a newborn in a crib compared to the evil that is CrApple™

@slinkyfpv 3 года назад

I had a 120 Mb drive back in the day. I was the $hit!

@stargazer7644 3 года назад

Surely it was a 120 MB drive?

@kellyherald1390 3 года назад

I've been enjoying these walks down memory lane. Back in those days you really had to know your computer. If your computer started having problems you couldn't just go to the internet for help. You either knew somebody or you were that somebody to fix the problem.

@JayJay-ki4mi 3 года назад

I miss the days going to the store to buy actual software. I still use floppy disks to store config files, wallets etc.

@garethfairclough8715 3 года назад

MICROSOFT! Didst thou commit half-inchery on disk compression??!

@19822andy 3 года назад

I can remember when 1GB was just madness.

@jasonuk8333 3 года назад

My first PC had a 420Mb drive. I recall being told that I'd never fill that.

@negirno 3 года назад

We upgraded from a 120 meg drive. Needles to say, it was mind blowing having all our games available without installing from floppies, or store in an archive to save space. And that's with dual booting with Windows 95, ironically with OS/2's boot manager...

@joshuarichardson6529 3 года назад

I once had a TRS-80 with a tape recorder to store files.

@AndrewAMartin 3 года назад

@@jasonuk8333 My first DOS PC had two 360K floppies, and a 20MB hard drive was $325 -- the PC itself was $1600, an optical mouse was $125. That was in 1986... (I didn't get either hard disk or mouse until much later) Before that, my parents had an Apple //e with two floppy drives, don't remember how much they held. I still have most of my old PCs, not that first one sadly, but I do have my second one and it's in mostly running order -- a 20MHz 286 with 4MB RAM, 300MB hard drive, EGA graphics, running DOS 6.22 and Windows 1.01. The EGA monitor and Windows 1 are from my first PC...

@micheliwaniec80 3 года назад

I do recall being struck by the DBLSPACE disk corruption in the 90s. So many files lost and no internet to know how to recover them. This taught me the hard way to backup more frequently, and to stay away from any automatic disk compression solutions forever after.

@SeanBZA 3 года назад

I bought the MSDOS 6.22 upgrade, which at the time meant all you had to buy was any computer part, and you qualified for the upgrade. I bought a parallel printer cable, as that was the cheapest part they had in stock. I had no printer at the time, but the cable was useful as a source of hook up wire.

@Nostalgianerd 3 года назад

Parallel port transfer was so fast back then.

@deusexaethera 3 года назад

Data compression is mathematics. Mathematics is all open-source. You can't steal something that's open-source.

@gregorymalchuk272 3 года назад

I agree, though unfortunately all the early compression algorithms were patented. I think gzip was the first open compression algorithm. Thankfully personal computing is sufficiently old that all of the important features are no longer patentable.

@monetize_this8330 3 года назад

But you can patent a *process* and that is what an algorithm is. I don't like it either.

@JohnDlugosz 3 года назад

@@gregorymalchuk272 gzip uses deflation, same as PKZIP. P.K. documented "deflation" and described it openly for anyone to use, _and_ patented a specifically optimized implementation of it. That's a good distinction of the two and he was openly non-villified for that.

@rsnilssen 3 года назад

do a story on how pkzip was a ripoff of arc, and how the fidonet community crushed arc due to.. erm, fake news :P

@chrisviklund 3 года назад

Omg fidonet, that takes me back to memory lane. Lovely days

@okaro6595 3 года назад

Not true. PKWare did start with PKARC. It was some five times faster than the Arc by Sea but apparently had copied some code from Arc. This resulted in a lawsuit in which PKWare agreed not to create Arc compatible software. They chose to create a new far better format: ZIP and PKZip/PKUnzip to handle it. At the time I had an 8088 PC. I saw Arc as interesting concept but with no use because of its slowness. PKArc changed all this. Like most my sympathies were on the side of PKWare (though Sea likely was right in the case). As a result I paid $47 for the PKZip.

@rsnilssen 3 года назад

@@okaro6595 Paul Katz even copied the spelling errors in arcs source. My impression is that calling it "some code" is quite the understatement. Arc were extensively used in the fidonet community to compress data before long distance calling.

@jamescarver6275 3 года назад

Another great video, thanks. The background music is a bit too distracting though...

@torchwoodcanaria 3 года назад

I seem to remember some PCs in the UK being advertised with Mahoosive hard drives, while the fact that compression had to be used was in MUCH smaller print!.

@JoelRiter 3 года назад

Capitalism: Its all good. The free market will always lead to the best consumer products and technology. Microsoft: hahaha money printer go bbbrrrrr

@mattpowell8369 3 года назад

Lol, what didn't Microsoft steal

@starman8853 3 года назад

Who knows lol but I can list quite a few things that are either stolen or just clones lol

@boostfrog 3 года назад

Uh...the name of the company I guess? I think at least that was a legitimately new idea.

@joshuarichardson6529 3 года назад

Steve Jobs was given a tour of the Xerox labs, where he saw the first GUI operating system. He went back to work, and stole the concept, to create the Lisa and Mac OS. He tried to get Microsoft in on supporting their new OS, but Gates instead stole the idea of a GUI OS to create Windows. He actually stole a stolen idea. So much theft in the industry.

@JohnDlugosz 3 года назад

@@joshuarichardson6529 The original (Xerox tour) wasn't stolen but freely given to anyone who would listen.

@looneyburgmusic 3 года назад

@@JohnDlugosz And that just backs up the point that MS didn't steal anything about the GUI, especially from CrApple™. While CrApple™ and Jobs was busy making "pretty" computers, MS and Bill were busy making computers that actually let us get some work done.

@selami32 3 года назад

2:12 thanks to who blurred that BBS numbers or else i would connect those

@NeoAF10 3 года назад

This was a fantastic video, I was always confused about the Doublespace vs Drivespace utilities. Also wondering what was the deal with MS DOS 6.22 being more popular.

@ash36230 3 года назад

For a moment with that intro I thought MS-DOS had SquareSpace included in the box XD

@AppliedCryogenics 3 года назад

Anyone else give a little cheer when Stacker won the 100M? Good stuff.

@looneyburgmusic 3 года назад

I remember laughing my ass off the day I read Stac had gone under for good... They should have made a deal with Microsoft, maybe they would have lasted a bit longer before failing utterly.

@MatthewWaltonWalton 3 года назад

Oh the memories! I was a kid when this was going on, but old enough to read about it in magazines and realise something dodgy was happening. Great to hear the story as an adult when I actually understand it.

@ihateevilbill 3 года назад

Wow... this brings back so many cool tech memories... I had double disk... it was fine XD What I remember more though is trying to get 601K to play the newest games and having to remove each TSR one at a time to see if I could at least play the game and have my mouse available at the same time XD I loved those days.

@nuthinnew3881 3 года назад

Didn’t they steal everything? Started with like DOS source code or something EDIT: it was an OS called TOPS-10 I was thinking of. When he and his pal went dumpster diving

@Nostalgianerd 3 года назад

The more you dig, the more they seem to have stolen.

@faile73 3 года назад

They never stole the DOS source code, the bought it fair and square for iirc like 50k US$. not their fault that it took off like it did and the original coder only got 50k. I am all for calling out big businesses on their practices, but so much of the stuff MS is accused of is just plain wrong or lies.....and I don't get why, they did so much bad shit for real, why do ppl keep inventing more. Where are the outraged Warriors of Justice when it comes to beloved Apple ? Read up on how Apple got their idea for the windows based Macintosh OS back in the early 80s.....that was scummy but it is ok because Apple

@Rhythmattica 3 года назад

@@faile73 No , Gates didn't steal Seattle DOS.. Bought it for a pittance at the last hour...but of course he wrote it, as far as the world is concerned....... Now the retort.... So I can say......." but so much of the stuff APPLE is accused of is just plain wrong or lies." As for Apple , Apple had a Business Agreement with Xerox...Apple did not steal it..... The details are everywhere if you care to look.... Gates Stole it with a deadline in a NDA. Had a Mac to do application development on,.but that NDA being now expired , all of a sudden windows appears? Do you not see, the entire time MS OS dev were already stealing from the day Gates had that Mac.... day 1 ! . Smart... yep.. But a Cunt. ... And oh , OS2 warp.. oh Lotus 123... oh... ect ect ect The worst thing off all, Apple have become MS.... MS has been , and always be MS, like what apple has now become. Disconnected to the people..... , only connected by Tech. To Add: Windows Based Mac OS????? Youve got to be kidding me.

@nuthinnew3881 3 года назад

@@faile73 I watched him say on a documentary the other day he was going through dumpsters looking for (and found) source code to find out how something works. Might not have been DOS

@nuthinnew3881 3 года назад

@@Nostalgianerd Just got home, i'll actually watch the video now!

@SlavicCelery 3 года назад

The fact STAC basically waited till after Microsoft signed on with the competitors product to go after them legally; bespeaks of sour lemons. This one is not like some of the other Microsoft issues.

@gallgreg 3 года назад

Great research and fascinating subject! Thanks for creating the video!!

@BSD2000 3 года назад

I've been using/building/programming computers since 1980 and wow, this brought back a flood of memories!

@johngay8416 3 года назад

Better question: Was there ANY Micro$oft product that wasn't stolen?

@jeffdavis6657 3 года назад

Didn't Bill write MS BASIC? I know he did not create the language I mean the tool, And they did buy QDoS

@Draugo 3 года назад

This is one of those cases where I'm firmly on Microsoft's side, partly because I dislike software patents and partly because this was a clear abuse of related but not similar technology and a patent of something Stac obviously had not come up with only by themselves.

@RetroSegaDev 3 года назад

Great video :) Really enjoyed it! Super old skool Nostalgia Nerdl :D

@marksterling8286 3 года назад

Those were the days I remember using dos 5.0 with stacker 2.0 for a long while until eventually moving to dos 6.22. The whole reason for using drive space doubling technology was Falcon 3.0 at the time I had a 210mb drive

@Breakfast_of_Champions 3 года назад

I compressed my brother's 486, it slowed to a crawl😟

@karolwojtyla3047 3 года назад

First! Greetings! ;)

@TheAnkMan 3 года назад

Congrats! Saw two when i clicked it. Might be within the top 10 myself.

@DanielleWhite 3 года назад

In the mid-summer of 1994 I got a Pentium 90MHz based system made by Insight as a graduation present. It came with MS-DOS 6.21. I had to reinstall it at one point and recall that the copy I had displayed an info screen during the install about Double Space; obviously an overlooked redaction in the rush to get that version to market.

@ThunderKat 3 года назад

I use to run double space back in my i386, was a life saver for my 80Mb HardDrive... Not all files get compress but is like running all your files as rar files and uncompressed on the fly when requested. Now this days all things already come with a level of compression, like textures on games, movies encoding, mp3 files, so not much use for it anymore.

@livefreeprintguns 3 года назад

That BBS screenshot was so great, I *just barely* missed out on the BBS scene.

@sbigglesby 3 года назад

Thanks for this. I recall using MS-DOS 5.0 and Stacker successfully together for several years in the early 1990's with my trusty Leading Edge 286 that had shipped with a 30mb HDD.

@DarkVoidIII 3 года назад

What I found most commonly turned out to be the case was whenever upgrading to a bigger hard drive, that it was far easier and simpler for me to buy a much bigger drive capacity and soon I ended up with disk drives in the high gigabyte range. If you buy a 700GB drive you get most of that as usable space after formatting is complete. Some older versions of Windows actually were a little shaky on disk sizes over a certain limit and would either create multiple partitions or be unable to reach the latter portion of space out of addressing reach. Newer versions did of course fix this but one could never have enough disk space it would seem! :D

@stargazer7644 3 года назад

Every hardware and software combination has disk/partition/file size limitations. We ran into this numerous times over the years, and it still happens today.

@dj_paultuk7052 3 года назад

I used to use DoubleSpace myself back in the old days on my HP 386 DX20. Seem to remember i had a 20mb HDD. But the performance hit of using doublespace was huge on a little cpu...

@fxeconomist 3 года назад

Interesting, it quite explains the accident I had in 1995 with DoubleSpace. I can't recall if I had MS-DOS 6.2 or prior - but seeing this I presume it was pre 6.2 - certainly something went very bad one day. It began with a crash, and I had to reboot. Then NDD found thousands of "lost chains" and I lost a large amount of data. It all ended with a format and I never returned to DoubleSpace nor did I ever try DriveSpace (Win '95 was far too heavy for my old computer).

@dempseydiscus 3 года назад

Ah the memories :-), I used stacker 4.0 on my pc of the time, it had 300MB and with stacker it was (almost) double, only thing was, it could take all night for it to defrag the harddrive, I would lie in my bed listening to the sounds of the harddrive working until I eventually fell asleep 😁

@MrJavaman5 3 года назад

We had Stacker on our 386 PC that only had a 60MB hard drive. It worked great. The only issue was the fact that it was a TSR program that took up precious memory.

@OscarSommerbo 3 года назад

I knew the rough outlines of the whole dblspace and DOS 6.22 but it was great to get all the details and corporate wrangling. It was the DOS 6 to 6.22 problems and a crashed disk that opened my eyes to what kind of company MS was. 1992-94 a tough time to grow up in the PC world.