On 13 August 2011 10:55, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote:
> How much better is AMATERSE than Deflate? Of course AMATERSE > supports IBM-peculiar file formats; others don't. I suspect terse is worse than deflate for most things. But AMATERSE (and its cousins on other platforms) are a very specific compression tool that use the terse (LZWegner) algorithm, and of course that algorithm can be used in any number of incompatible ways. I understand that IBM licensed the patent to modem makers and such with some success, but it expired several years ago. It would be interesting to see if a better performing and open source AMATERSE could be written... The compression is described in IBM's patent, and the details of the implementation are pretty simply reverse engineered from the data without any need to disassemble any code. Tony H.
