The LZ family of lossless compression algorithms has many, many variants each making use of various optimizations to eek out every bit of performance for a given application. There are so many variants that they are generally broken into two categories
One of the most ubiqitous algorithms in data compression is Huffman Coding. Developed in 1951 by David Huffman while a student at MIT, Huffman Coding makes use of a special type of binary tree called a huffman coding trie. Every message or fil
The Lempel-Ziv family of algorithms were introduced by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv in two papers over the course of 1977 & 1978. The algorithms detailed in those papers have come to be known as lz77 (lz1) and lz78(lz2), respectively. Since being i
In the early days of computing storage space was at a premium. It might hard to reconcile with now that having terrabytes of diskspace and gigabytes of ram in the average laptop that for a computer to have megabytes of storage available wouldn