This might not apply to all LZ based programs/algorithms but compress (an old Unix utility based on the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm) fell out of favour after it

This might not apply to all LZ based programs/algorithms but compress (an old Unix utility based on the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm) fell out of favour after it ran afoul of patent issues (you can read more about it on the compress Wikipedia page [0] and a section of the GIF Wikipedia page [1] which covers more about the enforcement of the patent). From what I can gather though, it enjoyed considerable success and was pretty much the standard utility for compressing data on Unix. I think eventually though it would have been replaced because other algorithms (bzip2, gzip, etc.) have slightly better compression ratios (even if they are more computationally expensive). [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compress [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enfo...