Did Microsoft Steal Disk Compression? | Nostalgia Nerd

[@amicloud_yt]

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

[@ReshiLuna]

I- lol-

[@1sonyzz]

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

[@JohnyG29]

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

[@Christopher-N]

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]

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

[@trafrellik7350]

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]

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

[@mgzukows]

@@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]

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]

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

[@Ehal256]

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

[@loughkb]

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]

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

[@BuckyOhYeah]

​@@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...

[@nneeerrrd]

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

[@nneeerrrd]

@r4rev2 wrong

[@nneeerrrd]

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

[@MCPicoli]

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]

im scarred for life too

[@orangejjay]

Same here. Never forget. Never again.

[@TheSilent333]

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]

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

[@vnaum]

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

[@sladewilson9741]

Me too! Was wonderful for my college laptop.

[@mbpoblet]

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]

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]

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!

[@FatNorthernBigot]

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

[@eval_is_evil]

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]

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]

@@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]

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

[@SlavicCelery]

@@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.

[@JavaTP]

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

[@zenkim6709]

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]

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

[@kbm2055]

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

[@lexihaley2887]

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]

This wake did they change?

[@carlospulpo4205]

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]

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

[@DeathBringer769]

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]

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]

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

[@rodmunch69]

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

[@dacsus]

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

[@rodmunch69]

@@dacsus can never please you fruits.

[@knofi7052]

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

[@BenLJackson]

Like when they bought Homer's CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet!

[@thehaigu321]

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

[@MirekFe]

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

[@MirekFe]

@Jean-Simon Chénard Why?

[@PhirePhlame]

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

[@rinsatomi9527]

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

[@jimmio3727]

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

[@fordgtguy]

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

[@g0mtnlee]

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.

[@Harp00nX]

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

[@deeiks12]

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.

[@mrcyberpunk]

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

[@stephenpointon]

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.

[@antonnym214]

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]

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

[@DM0407]

Ask for forgiveness not permission.

[@Run187]

Yeah, they stole windows from xerox..

[@antonnym214]

@@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]

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

[@theJellyjoker]

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

[@retrojacksgamingtunes2459]

@Dr ROLFCOPTER! r/whooosh

[@drwolfpoint]

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]

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

[@mcorrade]

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

[@kattz753]

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]

And rightnow google trying mimic it lol

[@JayMaverick]

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]

same experience

[@stargazer7644]

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.

[@fwingebritson]

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]

Lulw

[@schnittmagier5515]

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.

[@calebland6246]

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]

Yet, NTFS still supports file compression.

[@jmlemmi]

@@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]

@@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]

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]

@@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).

[@zdanee]

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

[@rodmunch69]

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.]

Ninetyies

[@stargazer7644]

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

[@salis-salis]

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

[@magmajctaz1405]

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]

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]

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

[@xponen]

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

[@rodmunch69]

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

[@sinn-zj3kk]

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.

[@Mr_Top_Hat_Jones]

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.

[@CameronHuff]

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]

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

[@DustinRodriguez1_0]

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!

[@JonManProductions]

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]

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

[@Netsuko]

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

[@sailaab]

Chris.. exactly!

[@80s_Gamr]

So?

[@csx296]

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

[@jayextarys8616]

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

[@JohnDlugosz]

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.)

[@noferblatz]

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]

And now Google/Alphabet become new scummy MSFT

[@LaskyLabs]

@@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]

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

[@NormanTheDormantDoormat]

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

[@looneyburgmusic]

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

[@Riz_]

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.

[@goodiesguy]

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

[@edisonfirmin3319]

6pm in the uk, perfectly timed for my dinner

[@randomlyJohnson]

2:17 in the maryland

[@HGAMES69]

1:57AM in Pakistan.

[@musteycraft]

Its 23:01 in germany Or 11:01PM

[@jeffteza682]

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.

[@monkeywithocd]

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]

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]

@@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.

[@m9078jk3]

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.

[@JimLeonard]

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]

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]

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

[@MatthewWaltonWalton]

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.

[@DM0407]

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

[@mrkitty777]

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

[@DS9TREK]

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

[@TheBrainSquared]

The term was Extend, Embrace, Extinguish

[@mrkitty777]

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]

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.

[@kellyherald1390]

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.

[@Vednier]

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

[@ckingpro]

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]

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

[@looneyburgmusic]

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]

@@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]

@@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 KZbin, 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]

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]

Is anyone surprised? I'm not.

[@looneyburgmusic]

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]

@@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.

[@AndySmallbone]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[@kstricl]

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]

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.

[@BSD2000]

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

[@GiuseppeGaetanoSabatelli]

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

[@SeanBZA]

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]

Parallel port transfer was so fast back then.

[@JoelRiter]

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

[@sbigglesby]

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.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

The real question is "Did I steal DOS from Microsoft by copying that floppy?"

[@BilisNegra]

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).

[@grilledflatbread4692]

Doublespace was really buggy and not as stable as stacker.

[@looneyburgmusic]

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

[@kattz753]

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]

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

[@grilledflatbread4692]

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

[@rudolfabelin383]

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!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@deusexaethera]

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

[@gregorymalchuk272]

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]

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

[@JohnDlugosz]

@@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.

[@agh0x01]

Thank you! for mentioning DR DOS 6.0. I believe it shipped around the same time as MS DOS 5.0 and was streets ahead. I convinced my father to buy it to run on his IBM PS/2 and we found it a great OS with many advantages over MS DOS 5.0. Of course, MS was its usual bully self, seeing others' good ideas, copying them, and then crushing them.

[@mattpowell8369]

Lol, what didn't Microsoft steal

[@starman8853]

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

[@boostfrog]

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

[@joshuarichardson6529]

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]

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

[@looneyburgmusic]

@@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.

[@cliffgarrett]

I watched the dev do the clean room development of double space, so no, it wasn’t stolen at all. It was written from the ground up.

[@19822andy]

I can remember when 1GB was just madness.

[@jasonuk8333]

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

[@negirno]

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]

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

[@AndrewAMartin]

@@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...

[@NeoAF10]

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.

[@rsnilssen]

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]

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

[@okaro6595]

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]

@@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.

[@cbarger2327]

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]

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?

[@SlavicCelery]

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.

[@rickyyoung]

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

[@AppliedCryogenics]

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

[@looneyburgmusic]

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.

[@UXXV]

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

[@nuthinnew]

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]

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

[@faile73]

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]

@@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.

[@nuthinnew]

@@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

[@nuthinnew]

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

[@lukefreeman828]

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]

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

[@Draugo]

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.

[@matthewsheeran]

That was good: "We came, we saw, we doubled." And we had forgotten all about it. I used to use Windows compressed folders later but dont bother anymore as storage is now enough if you zip as well as simply archive off disk to a dual raid mirrored backup device.

[@ash36230]

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

[@JacGoudsmit]

Yeah I remember all those disk compression programs. The big winners of that time were tape drive manufacturers. If you didn't have a compressed drive, a corrupted file was easy to restore from a floppy backup, but if your compressed drive went kerplooey, you had to restore the entire drive whether you liked it or not. And that happened pretty often. We've come a long way since then.

[@Breakfast_of_Champions]

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

[@OscarSommerbo]

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.

[@johngay8416]

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

[@jeffdavis6657]

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

[@sheivongamboa]

nice to know the pass... cuz many of us come after these events and would be nice to know the history of somethings....... keep it up ... goood job bro....

[@karolwojtyla3047]

First! Greetings! ;)

[@TheAnkMan]

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

[@Linuxhippy2]

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

[@gallgreg]

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

[@micheliwaniec80]

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.

[@tastymacification]

Love your videos. Hate the stock footage.

[@dj_paultuk7052]

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...

[@RetroSalesAustralia]

I ran Stacker 2.0 on my 286 with a 40MB drive. It worked very well and I could then install Kings Quest 6! Good times

[@JayJay-ki4mi]

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

[@GrymsArchive]

OMG DoubleSpace! I remember the issues with the original implantation and so did my friends

[@Bacon420]

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]

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]

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

[@torchwoodcanaria]

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!.

[@dvdemon187]

Nice history lesson, thanks for bringing up those memories. But with the advent of Windows 95 and the ever increasing hard drive sizes, Microsoft should have phased out the disk compression. But no, even in Win10 you can tick the box "Compress this drive to save disk space" which does absolutely nothing, except slow down the system, because most of the files today can't even be compressed anymore. I had dozens of clients over the past decades who thought it would be smart to use this option only to find out that their systems became unusable. Great stuff, Microsoft.

[@MrJavaman5]

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.

[@livefreeprintguns]

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

[@DarkVoidIII]

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]

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.

[@KieronWray]

fascinating, loved it. thanks for collating and presenting this