🚀 go-pugleaf

As a followup to my original post which started this thread:

I found the transparent compression program which works at disk driver level at the mac expo
in London on friday. It looked incredible, so I purchased it immediately.  They will ship it
in a fortnight (they only had a beta on display, unfortunately). So all my comments are just
from my demo of the product, *not* from actual use.

It's called Times Two from Golden Triangle.  It works by replacing your current disk drivers
with the TimesTwo drivers. After you install it, your disk space is (looks) *actually*
doubled!  I.e. the 80 meg LC they were showing said 160M disk in the finder (well actually it
said 10M used, 150M free). Applications are the same size as before. It seems to work
quickly. I forgot to take speedometer, so I couldn't give any hard figures, but booting up
Word 5 seemed just as slow as normal! (i.e. no slower). And Excel loaded up quite fast too.

How it works:

I'm not a big technoweeny, but I'll try.  Disk drivers interpret system calls to read and
write information to the disk.  I.e. write (hello).  The driver works out where to put it,
translates it into binary, and writes onto the disk (and vice versa for reads).  The new
driver simply translates it into *smaller* compressed binary, and vice versa.

Compatibility:

Since it works at such a low level, it is (i think) inherently compatible with anything. It
only really interfaces with the toolbox routines in ROM, so all applications (they all work
with the toolbox) work correctly and see no change.  The only incompatibility I can see is in
System 8 or 9 if they change the disk management software (remember when we all had to
upgrade to system 7 disk drivers?)  So that will be a simple upgrade.

And you thought that was cool:

Here's the great part.  Do you have syquest drives?  If so you're happy.  Syquest (and I
suppose other removables) can be formatted with these drivers, and appear as double size
drives to the finder.  And since the disk driver is loaded when you mount the drive, you can
use the double size drive anywhere.

Scenerio: Format a new syquest 88 meg cartridge on your home mac. Pop Times Two drivers on it.
          Look at it. It says it is 172 megs big.  And it doesn't have a single file on it.
          Take it to the office and pop it in the office syquest drive. It is still 172 megs.
          Put some files on it, and take it to the bureau.
          The files are unchanged (don't appear compressed), the bureau can read them, every-
          one is happy.

New scenerio:  Buy a 256M 3.5" optical drive.  Format with drivers.
               Now is 512M optical in disk the size of a 1.4M floppy!

Unfortunately:  Don't try formatting a floppy with the Times Two drivers - won't work.

When I get Times Two, i'll try some speed tests (speedometer before and after installing) on
my cx on the 40M internal and the 105M external.  If anyone has any other tests that I should
do, post them and I'll try and summarize.

Summary:  I think it's brilliant.  I was laughing at the demo it seemed so simple and
          obvious.