Softdisk Text Compressor

The Softdisk Text Compresssor was yet another format used by Softdisk Publishing on its diskmagazines in the 1990s. It was not released to the public, but was used as an internal utility to prepare text files for publication, with the decompressor embedded in the "shell" program used to display the articles when the diskmagazine issue was read. It was developed in 1993 and used on some issues of Softdisk PC. It was a simple compression routine designed to squeeze a few bytes out of typical English-language ASCII files in a time when saving a handful of bytes was still important; the diskmagazines were published on floppy disks and expected to be runnable directly from the disk without installing on a hard drive, so getting those couple of bytes out of the file so it went one 1K disk block smaller was critical to resolve a "disk full" error during the deadline crunch to get out an issue. (You kids have it so easy with your terabyte hard drives...)

The format was as follows:

[to be filled in]

Sample files

 * Sample compressed text file