Star Simpson

Maybe, but I bet you could have read and decompressed 8K of data faster than you could have read it uncompressed. (Now I guess I need to try it and find out)

In my case I just had no access to any literature on algorithms. Doesn't sound like the author of that article had ever read about general purpose compression either

I think the issue back then was as slow and small as disk/ram were, cpu wasn’t much better. Nowadays, cpu cycles a dime a dozen, easier to make the trade off.

Might be. But disk was *really* slow, like 2K/sec or worse. Even if it costs 50 cycles per byte to decompress, that's still a 10x speedup at 1 MHz

So we didn’t compress code, but we DID compress hires images. Loaded/displayed faster, could fit a bunch more in RAM, if needed.

Thanks! Now I see too another block-oriented hires compression method, in http://www.callapple.org/Members/magazine/1982/Call%20APPLE%20magazine%201982-05.pdf …. The other method I did know about was storing the drawing instructions instead of the final image

“The Wizard and The Princess” -style!