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From: dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Problems with Compress
Message-ID: <8709271656.AA01246@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Sun, 27-Sep-87 12:56:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: cory.8709271656.AA01246
Posted: Sun Sep 27 12:56:31 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 28-Sep-87 02:07:37 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 23

>In article <780@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>! Will people who compress stuff for distribution PLEASE use 12-bit. 16-bit
>! uses a huge amount of memory and may not even be available on small machines
>! like PDP-11s and Intels.
>
>   Don't suck Intel machines into this -- 16-bit compress is available for
>both DOS and Xenix.  It also saves a considerable (meaning not negligible)
>amount of space.  Try as I might, I just can't feel sorry for you.  Surely
>you have access to some machine that can do 16-bit uncompresses?

	The problem is that the 16 bit compress needs 300-400K of working
space and people with 512K Amiga's can't use it.  I used 12 bit compress on
my amiga until I expanded to 2 Meg, then switched to 16 bit compress.  Even
with 2 Meg the system can sometimes get fragmented in such a way that 
compress can't allocate enough contiguous storage.

	However, 16 bit compress is a defacto standard for the ArpaNet
anyway and usually all that's available on major nodes unless you want to
go off and recompile it.  Anybody intending a personal computer distribution,
though, should use the 12 bit compress.  (But hell, forget compress... if
doing a personal computer distribution use ARC or something).

				-Matt