3 ms·

> LZ77 compression was fine, and hashing was fine, apparently the combination of the two became a patentable innovation lolwat

lproven 3y ago
I think there is a lot of disingenuity in this post. Microsoft was an extremely hostile, aggressive company in those times. (I have seen little to no evidence that it is very different now, but then it was famed for it, and was constantly in court for what I will diplomatically call intellectual property violations.) The real story is: * MS went to all these companies and said, in essence, "we're going to bundle your code so either give it to us free or we'll go to your rivals. But you'll make money selling updates and upgrades to all the people who get free versions!" So, as the company says, it got a free version of Central Point Backup from the PC Tools vendor, and other tools from Symantec. This was an obvious lie but many companies felt that they had no choice so they signed up. * STAC Inc was the author of Stacker, the most feature-rich and highest-compressing disk compression package. It was the only one that ran on OSes other than MS-DOS and PC-DOS -- it also ran natively on OS/2 2, where I used it myself. It also offered a hardware compression-offload expansion card, for faster data compression/decompression. (Cheap, much cheaper than a bigger hard disk in the very early 1990s.) Stac entered negotiations with MS, and very foolishly, it gave MS access to the Stacker source code. * Then, Stac management changed its mind and said no. MS copied some of the data compression code into the inferior disk-compression tools it had got from Vertisoft and shipped it. * MS denied the theft. STAC sued. STAC proved it, with the help of Geoff Chappell (among others) who just died very recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37384911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37384911 * MS had to: 1. Remove the functionality (thus MS-DOS 6.21, with no compression, followed by MS-DOS 6.22, with DriveSpace instead, with the offending code rewritten as the blog post describes.) 2. Pay Stac damages. (IIRC, ITRO $200 million.) Stac bought ReachOut with the proceeds and tried to get into remote control tech support, knowing that now disk compression was bundled, it was doomed. The effort only succeeded briefly: Stac was correct, but the future was remote control over the Internet, not direct point-to-point dialup connections which was the focus of ReachOut. * Nobody paid for antivirus updates for the DOS antivirus; if they cared, they bought a whole new antivirus. Nobody paid for an enhanced defrag, or defrag at all any more; or for backup tools, or anything else that was bundled. With Scandisk there was little need for disk-repair tools, either, so the PC utilities market cratered. The MS-DOS memory management was good enough that the market for memory management tools such as 386Max, Quarterdeck QEMM386, and the like collapsed as well. As did the market for DR-DOS: MS-DOS 6.x was perceived as a safer bet, and it was good enough, while a rival _might_ not be perfectly compatible. It was -- better in places -- but there was doubt. * CPS and the others went bankrupt, killed by MS.

lproven 3y ago

I think there is a lot of disingenuity in this post. Microsoft was an extremely hostile, aggressive company in those times. (I have seen little to no evidence that it is very different now, but then it was famed for it, and was constantly in court for what I will diplomatically call intellectual property violations.) The real story is: * MS went to all these companies and said, in essence, "we're going to bundle your code so either give it to us free or we'll go to your rivals. But you'll make money selling updates and upgrades to all the people who get free versions!" So, as the company says, it got a free version of Central Point Backup from the PC Tools vendor, and other tools from Symantec. This was an obvious lie but many companies felt that they had no choice so they signed up. * STAC Inc was the author of Stacker, the most feature-rich and highest-compressing disk compression package. It was the only one that ran on OSes other than MS-DOS and PC-DOS -- it also ran natively on OS/2 2, where I used it myself. It also offered a hardware compression-offload expansion card, for faster data compression/decompression. (Cheap, much cheaper than a bigger hard disk in the very early 1990s.) Stac entered negotiations with MS, and very foolishly, it gave MS access to the Stacker source code. * Then, Stac management changed its mind and said no. MS copied some of the data compression code into the inferior disk-compression tools it had got from Vertisoft and shipped it. * MS denied the theft. STAC sued. STAC proved it, with the help of Geoff Chappell (among others) who just died very recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37384911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37384911 * MS had to: 1. Remove the functionality (thus MS-DOS 6.21, with no compression, followed by MS-DOS 6.22, with DriveSpace instead, with the offending code rewritten as the blog post describes.) 2. Pay Stac damages. (IIRC, ITRO $200 million.) Stac bought ReachOut with the proceeds and tried to get into remote control tech support, knowing that now disk compression was bundled, it was doomed. The effort only succeeded briefly: Stac was correct, but the future was remote control over the Internet, not direct point-to-point dialup connections which was the focus of ReachOut. * Nobody paid for antivirus updates for the DOS antivirus; if they cared, they bought a whole new antivirus. Nobody paid for an enhanced defrag, or defrag at all any more; or for backup tools, or anything else that was bundled. With Scandisk there was little need for disk-repair tools, either, so the PC utilities market cratered. The MS-DOS memory management was good enough that the market for memory management tools such as 386Max, Quarterdeck QEMM386, and the like collapsed as well. As did the market for DR-DOS: MS-DOS 6.x was perceived as a safer bet, and it was good enough, while a rival _might_ not be perfectly compatible. It was -- better in places -- but there was doubt. * CPS and the others went bankrupt, killed by MS.