Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site looking.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: What a good news compressor should do
Message-ID: <138@looking.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 20-Mar-84 00:00:00 EST
Article-I.D.: looking.138
Posted: Tue Mar 20 00:00:00 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 21-Mar-84 03:35:38 EST
References: <149@forcm5.UUCP>
Organization: Looking Glass Software, Waterloo, Ont
Lines: 21

A good news compressor would save a lot of people a lot of money, at
the expense of a fair amount of cpu time.  Great for vaxes with cpu
to burn at night, not a good idea for my Onyx.  There are various
huffman encoders out there, you could ask around for one in public domain,
I am sure you will find one.  They're pretty easy to write.

But a news encoder could do a lot better than a typical huffman.  First
of all, the news header can be reduced a great deal in size.  All Header
prefixes, such as "Relay-Version", could be reduced to almost nothing.
Dates and such can be reduced easily.

Then if you know you are talking about English text, you can do a lot
by keeping a small dictionary of words - say the most common 1000 which
you keep in ram.  Of course, everybody has to keep the same list.
You could add a few hundred common site names too.

Overall, I could see this cutting the news phone bill down to 1/3 of what
it is now.   If your site pays for news, it is worth your time and the
salary you get for it to write such code for your company!
-- 
	Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ontario (519) 886-7304