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Author: Andy McFadden Written: June 1993 Summary: Transparent file compression Description: [ I have received permission from the original publisher to make HP freely available. I'm waiting for a clarification on a minor point.] HardPressed is a commercial data compression product for the Apple IIgs. Because the Apple II product line was being phased out, the market for IIgs products was collapsing in a big way around the time this was released. It sold a little over 1000 copies. HP's main feature was expanding files when they were opened and compressing them when they were modified and closed. Sub-features included dynamically loadable compression modules that could be chained together (RLE + LZW works better and faster on some types of files than just plain LZW), profiles that determined which algorithms were used for which files, manual access to compression and expansion though a "Finder extension", file write caching, and best of all, it was tolerably fast on a 2.5MHz Apple IIgs. With an accelerator card, LZSS compression just about broke even when reading files from an AppleDisk 3.5 (the increase in CPU time was offset by the decrease in disk load time). A reasonable HP installation could fit on a System 6.0/6.0.1 disk if you compressed some of the files, and the time to boot was about the same. I don't know if this will be of interest to the Apple II emulator crowd -- CPUs are getting faster, but disks are expanding at a tremendous rate -- but here it is. There is no support available for this product. The publisher has asked that their name and phone number be removed from the product to avoid people calling their tech support line. You are on your own.