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Double Your Disk Capacity!
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sharkeeper
Lifer
That was about the time of the fearless CSC "AK47" VLB caching SCSI controller. 8MB cache loaded WP 5.1 faster on a 286-16 than the guys with 486-33's and conner IDE drives! Why of course, it was SCSI! 🙂
dullard
Elite Member
I tried one program. It did work quite well if you are willing to work within its limitations:
[*]Some programs would have an occasional warning message that would be written over your work, thus you'd have to hope there was a refresh screen button.
[*]Having actual photos was just becoming common, and these never compress well. So you would want to not compress these files to minimize overhead.
[*]Overhead did slow down your computer, but remarkably it wasn't that bad back then. Why? No intense 3D games where you need all the power you could get. Often, you could either run a program or not - and if you could run it a ~20% slowdown was unnoticible.
It was great for your backups. Put everything on there that you aren't currently using.
[*]Some programs would have an occasional warning message that would be written over your work, thus you'd have to hope there was a refresh screen button.
[*]Having actual photos was just becoming common, and these never compress well. So you would want to not compress these files to minimize overhead.
[*]Overhead did slow down your computer, but remarkably it wasn't that bad back then. Why? No intense 3D games where you need all the power you could get. Often, you could either run a program or not - and if you could run it a ~20% slowdown was unnoticible.
It was great for your backups. Put everything on there that you aren't currently using.
Ahh yes, disk compression. Oh the memories. My 386/16 with 4 meg of ram, 2 20meg drives and 1 10 meg running through a Perstor MFM controller card then stacker. I almost had a quarter of a gig and that thing would load Windows 3.1 in under 5 minutes. Yessiree!! it was a screamer 🙂 And I still have the board, processor, math co-processor, ram, Perstor card and a couple of drives for it, maybe I'll dig it out and put it back together just to relive the horror..
Speed
Speed
VirtualLarry
No Lifer
Give me details or I call Shens on that.
VirtualLarry
No Lifer
You do realize, that most of us with "ordinary" machines, were lucky to have 8MB total system RAM at the time, right? 🙂 (Those crazy peeps with 16MB system RAM, allocating an 8MB RAMDRIVE and loading Win3.1 directly from there.. instant shutdown/startup reload cycles..)
Quityerbitchin
Junior Member
Ohhh man.. Taking me back...
To a conversation I had with a friend..
"Hey have you heard of the thing called Stacker?, it's like an on-the-fly compression thing"
Ohhh, that sounds pretty scary, what happens if it fails...?
"dunno, I am going to try it."
Two weeks later he was spewing forth hatred and fdisk, format, reinstall doo dah doo dah!
-QYB
To a conversation I had with a friend..
"Hey have you heard of the thing called Stacker?, it's like an on-the-fly compression thing"
Ohhh, that sounds pretty scary, what happens if it fails...?
"dunno, I am going to try it."
Two weeks later he was spewing forth hatred and fdisk, format, reinstall doo dah doo dah!
-QYB
nakedfrog
No Lifer
Yeah, IIRC they released the compression utility in DOS 6.2, got taken to court over improper licensing or something similar. Then they were forced to release 6.21, which was the same as 6.2 minus the compression, and within fairly short order either cleared up the licensing or just got it from someone else and released 6.22, the best MS-DOS ever.
Your friend lacked the fortitude to solve the problem.... Stacker created a volume on your disk that stored all the compressed data.... once you understand how stacker works it's just a matter of adding the proper commands into the Config.sys, and autoexec.bat to specify the volume and voila... you got your sh!t back.
-Max
sharkeeper
Lifer
Well there was nothing wrong with having 1/4 of the ram (32MB) in a dedicated hardware cache. If there was such thing as speeding tickets for computers, I would be on American's most wanted.
Do a search, there was a thread on it (with a link) on the forums some months, or many months ago. Apparently, there was really something to it.
Edit: The details.
VirtualLarry
No Lifer
No, well, sort of. They blatantly violated Stacker's "LZS" compression patent. So MS was forced by the courts to remove it from MS-DOS 6.x, so they released a newer interim version without it at all (6.21?), and then a later (6.22?) with the replacement version. (Different compression scheme, slightly lower performance.)
Disturbingly, they also hit Stacker with a trade-secret infringement lawsuit, over their use of the new (but still undocumented) APIs in MS-DOS 6.2x to pre-load the compression driver binary off of the host volume, at the same time that IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS were loaded during the initial OS bootstrap phase. MS argued that since the API was undocumented, that it was a trade-secret, and that Stacker unlawfully must have discovered it or something. (It was a completely BS lawsuit, but MS was trying to kill them off, so that MS wouldn't get a judgement against themselves in the patent-infringement suit.)
Of course the fact was that MS puts LOADS of "undocumented" APIs in their OSes, and that using them is in fact key to being able to write successful apps and utils for their OSes. So that legal tactic by them was a bit new, but also a bit concerning for the entire industry, in terms of their continued 3rd-party support of the Windows' platform.
But such is the life of trying to "dance with the beast from Redmond". One day you are writeing code to support their platform and profit from it, and the next you are being hauled into court, with the very future of the life of your company at stake. Such is MS.
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