Several times in my life, I’ve asked a question that nobody could answer. Sometimes I wait patiently and the answer comes one decade later (such as a walkthrough to Tass Times in Tonetown) or even two decades later (the solution to Hack). Other times, my need for information is too great and I research it myself (8088 Corruption) or architect a solution that can provide me the answer (MobyGames). The latter is a lot of work — I greatly prefer the former, as does everyone. But it doesn’t happen often, and sometimes I write off the entire cause and forget about it.

Today, however, I had one of those moments. I’m a compression geek, with a focus on high-performance decompression. I’ve always wondered how well real-time disk compression products like Stacker, Drivespace, Doublespace, SuperStor, EZDrive, etc. performed. How fast were they at compression? Decompression? How much compression did each achieve on a set of test data? Well, today I stumbled across this:

Real-time Data Compression Algorithms’ Benchmarks

After everyone is in bed tonight, I am setting aside an entire hour with a comfy chair to sit in and a pop to just… soak it all in.