In the '80s and early '90s, compression was king. As you struggled to connect to a BBS (bulletin board system) with the latest Amiga utilities on, you dreamed of when things would be faster and not having to spend as long decompressing files as they took to download. Fast forward a few decades and the sheer size of the data files we juggle about is pretty boggling. Many have built in compression of some kind. Bandwidth isn't such an issue any more, and in some ways neither is disk space, but it would still be nice if there was a quick and convenient way of reclaiming a few GB here or there, or not having to wait so long when uploading email attachments. Compression technologies have moved on in the interim, but perhaps not as much as you may expect, because we're fighting against an exponential curve of just how far things can be compacted. Many data formats are nigh on incompressible, because they've already squeezed the redundancies out. Nevertheless, there are some tools available that leverage our superfast CPUs and gargantuan memory reserves to try some new tricks. In this test, we're looking at a selection of old and new tools currently available. Some don't get a review, but are included in our tabulated data, which you'll find both in cut-down form here and a full version of online - gzip is there for comparative purposes, for instance.
The rest is here: