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I still think the worst MS did was stealing Stacker technology. If you are going to steal something, at least steal something that actually works. At that time, between myself and my three employees, we had 17 PCs, that we had to deal with the 6.2/6.21/6.22 fiasco, what a major pain in the rear, between systems not working because Stacker had crashed them, to not being able to remove the stacker compression without reformatting, then waiting on updates to be shipped from MS. Grrr...

Brice Manuel wrote:I still think the worst MS did was stealing Stacker technology. If you are going to steal something, at least steal something that actually works. At that time, between myself and my three employees, we had 17 PCs, that we had to deal with the 6.2/6.21/6.22 fiasco, what a major pain in the rear, between systems not working because Stacker had crashed them, to not being able to remove the stacker compression without reformatting, then waiting on updates to be shipped from MS. Grrr...

I agree! We also had some major problems with Stacker and we asked ourselves - "Why don't they compress each file individual, as with other packing systems? So you don't lose "the whole sh*t", when something goes wrong."

From what I remember there were 2 different (maybe the same) compressions from microsoft: drivespace (stacker?) & doublespace...

But I'm just wondering why did you need to compress drives at a company? Usually the reason to compress them would be because you were low on funds and couldn't afford a bigger drive?

On some occasions you may get a slight increase in speed (if using a fast cpu) over non-compression - but the risks make it not worth it in a business.

But I'm just wondering why did you need to compress drives at a company?

In our case it was space. 120MB drives were the norm back then, when 850MB drives finally hit, we upgraded to them, but back then an 850MB Maxtor went for $299 USD, so they were not exactly cheap, especially in a business setting where you needed several. Plus back then, the OS & BIOS could not use an 850MB drive so you were using the special "loader" software to get the BIOS and OS to recognize and be able to use the whole drive without partitioning the heck out of it ;c)

drivespace (stacker?)

IIRC the initial drvspace used stacker, after the court order forcing MS to remove stacker, 6.22 updated DOS to the new drvspace which didn't use Stacker for compression.

BIOS could not use an 850MB

good point.