Reply 20 of 53, by Gemini000
- Rank
- l33t
When it comes to applications in the early days of DOS, space was typically more important than speed, so optimizing an application was a very different process for the programmer as you would be trying to make the program take up as little space as possible. Plus, you typically make content of some kind with an application, so developers had to come up with very creative ways of storing that data in as little space as possible, with one of the most common methods of data compression being RLE or "Run Length Encoding", or for something like a word processor or database program you would reduce the bits per character from 8 to 7 to completely ignore extended ASCII characters, or even down to 6 if you could exclude numbers, punctuations, or such, and even include special coding to indicate that a character or set of characters following required more bits than normal.
Also, I still use Deluxe Paint 2E. ;D
--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
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