Fundamental Data Compression

Appendix A

Brief history

Data compression

Data compression can be viewed as the art of creating shorthand representations for the data, but this process started as early as 1000 BC. The short list below gives a brief survey of the historical milestones:

• 1000 BC shorthand

• 1829 Braille code

• 1838 Morse code was invented for use in telegraphy

• 1843 variable-length codes for telegraph

• 1930 analog compression

• 1948 information theory

• 1949 coding blocks based on their probabilities

• 1951 Huffman codes

• 1966 Run-length coding

• 1976 arithmetic coding

• 1970s dynamic Huffman coding

• 1977 dictionary-based compression

• 1982 LZSS (by Storer and Szymanski)

• 1984 LZW (LZ was improved by Terry Welch); pulse position modulation (PPM)

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