Date   : Mon, 18 Sep 2006 10:43:16 +0100
From   : Rob <robert@...>
Subject: Re: Compressed ROMFS?

At 09:10 18/09/2006, Steve O'Leary wrote:


>I'm glad you've had a go and got some figures. I can't see LZW 
>performing any better than Huffman on binaries and the savings were 
>not that brilliant. The thing is for the life in me I cannot 
>actually remember why I wanted to do this in the first place now. 
>There was a reason to it all, perhaps images, I'm not sure.


There was some experimental "high resolution" images offered by 
Prestel/Micronet, once, just about 20 years ago..  (High being about 
beeb mode 2 as opposed to the usual (mode 7) graphics..)  Data was 
encoded on the pages pretty much as per the telesoftware (i.e. in 
visible ascii with shift characters) and i think it used a simple 
style of RLE to draw the images, one scan line at a time.  (15 black 
pixels, 27 red pixels, 17 blue .. etc..)

It was painfully slow, as you would expect sending even this 
compressed data down at 1200baud ..  certainly not something you 
would want to use during normal browsing.

I /might/ still have the client and possibly some saved images about 
somewhere. Almost certainly not the raw frames, though, and 
definitely not the encoder ..


Rob