According to Cliff :
On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 02:39:19 +0000, (DoN.
Nichols) wrote:

gzip (GNU zip)

There are also UNIX utilities compact & compress. Are they on Linux?
I'd sort of expect so but .... IIRC compact may have problems with
largish files ( ~ 1MB).

Compress (based on the Lempel-Ziv algorithm) had fallen out of
favor because the algorithm was patented, and the holder of the patent
(Unisys) was insisting on charging royalties for any use of it (after it
had been open source for a time) -- with no exceptions for open-source
freely-distributed programs. I *think* that the patent has now expired,
so it is freely available again, but gzip and bzip2 are so much more
efficient that there seems to be little likelihood that the older
compress will come back into common usage.

I note that it does come with Sun's Solaris -- at least from
SunOs 4.1.4 all the way up to Solaris 10. (Though I remember the days
when I had to compile it to use it.)

As for "compact" -- that may be truly antique, as I don't have
any examples of it.

The first three pages of Google hits for "compact program
source" offered nothing of any apparent relevance.

I do remember one program which I got from the OS-9 user's group
library (Microware's OS-9, not the recent Macintosh one) which was a bit
more configurable than most -- and as a result, it was the only one
which worked on a BBN C70 (mostly v7 unix like), because that machine
had 10-bit bytes, 20-bit words, and 40-bit longs. While "compress"
worked well enough on plain text files, it totally blew up on binaries.

This program, however, could be configured to the byte size, so
it worked quite well on that system.

Enjoy,
DoN.

P.S. I may not see your replies, because I normally have you
killfiled to keep away from the political discussions. I
happened to follow a couple of thread branches into your
comments (which were marked as already read, but I knew that I
had *not* read them, just to see what they contained.

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