Will the real PKZ110.EXE please stand up?

I've been researching the version history of PKZIP, the once-popular compression software that gave us the still-popular ZIP file format. There are two important MS-DOS versions of it: v1.10, released in March 1990, which was the latest official version for more than 2.5 years, until v2.04c(?) was released in December 1992.v2.04g, released February 1993, which …

I could care less about your word crimes

I always assumed that pretty much everyone knew that the phrase "I could care less" doesn't make literal sense. I assumed it was simply an unfortunate shortened form of "I couldn't care less". I think it's popular because it has better cadence. It might be helped along by the likely element of sarcasm in it. …

Survey of PackBits-like RLE compression schemes

This post is a survey of some run-length encoding (RLE) data compression formats, most of which are used for bitmapped graphics. One such format is PackBits. It's sort of the granddaddy of them, or the canonical example of such a format. Sometimes, formats similar to it are said to be "PackBits-like", though the term doesn't …