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From: rhg@cpsolv.UUCP (Richard H. Gumpertz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Why aren't new articles compressed?
Message-ID: <431@cpsolv.UUCP>
Date: 26 Oct 89 22:31:26 GMT
Reply-To: rhg@cpsolv.uucp (Richard H. Gumpertz)
Organization: Computer Problem Solving, Leawood, Kansas
Lines: 17

This is so obvious that it must have been asked before, but nobody I asked
seems to have answer.  Please bear with me and answer it one more time.

My totally unscientific eye tells me that typical news articles are about
1-2000 bytes long (with many smaller an many larger).  Anyway, this would seem
to indicate that compression might reduce the typical article from 2 disk
blocks (at 1K) to 1.  Bigger articles might do even better; small articles
would stay at one block.

Why aren't news articles compressed (and decompressed when read or forwarded)?
Does C news maybe compress them?  It seems like an effective halving of disk
usage would easily pay for the cycles needed to compress/uncompress.
-- 
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