LZ77 compression prehistory

LZ77 is a widely-used class of data compression algorithms. I'll start with a quick overview of it. Assuming you're compressing a stream of bytes (a "file"), your LZ77 compressed data, at a high level, would contain two possible kinds of instructions for the decompressor: Emit literal: {byte value=A}Copy from history: {match-offset=B, match-length=C} The match-offset may …