Drew Scott Daniels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > LZW was a patented algorithm which was included in Unix's compress and > some versions of the gif file format.
Minor history. Unix had "compact", which used Huffman compaction. Compress came along later, and the main force behind it was Usenet. I remember the heady days in which people were falling over each other trying to write better and better LZW compression agents. But IIRC, BSD 4.3 contained no compress.
