Drivespace was what enabled me to play Baldurs Gate 1 back in the day. My specs back then:
- 32MB RAM
- Pentium166 MMX
- 500ish MB drive (My 2GB went bust, so I used an old spare drive for quite a while)
- 16X CDROM
- 2X CD Burner... yarr, that made me a lot of money
- 3dFX Voodoo2 8MB coupled with an ATI Rage Pro
- Soundblaster Live
wooo, look at mr high end over here :-)
640kb RAM 2 x 512 floppies CGA green screen / monochrome
That wasn't my first PC, just the one on which I played BG1 and used drivespace. My 1st PC was more like the generation after yours. 386 of some sort, 2x 3.5" floppies, and a whooping 43MB harddisk.
Sounds similar to my 2nd. 386SX with 20mb hd. 4mb RAM. She was a beast.
The idea is still around! Apple’s APFS file system (and HFS+in its later days) support sort-of transparent compression, and on all its platforms most system files - the ones that don’t change much - are compressed to save space for user files. There’s surprisingly little documentation about this.
There’s a third party tool you can use to compress files yourself: https://github.com/RJVB/afsctool
It looks like the technical details are in this pdf: https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-System-Reference.pdf
Btrfs has compression as well. It compressed my root partition to a third of it's size. It helps out with some games as well, but they usually are not as compressible. The performance impact is pretty minimal as long as you don't set the compression level excessively high.
Which came first, DriveSpace or Norton Speed Disk? I thought Norton was first.
But look at that estimation screen! Again, rant all you wish, Microsoft knew how to handle a long running task even back in MS-DOS days. In this case, it’s estimated at 46 minutes. Great!
Meanwhile, today it's often just "beachball!". It's become a bit of a lost art.
