DiskDoubler

» see salientsoftware.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

diskdoubler was first shown at the macworld expo in san francisco in april 1990. terry morse and lloyd chambers wrote it. salient software was the company they spun out of the demo, on a $25,000 loan from guy kawasaki. the pitch was that your hard drive could effectively hold twice as much because diskdoubler would compress files transparently as you saved them and decompress them when you opened them. you barely noticed. system 7 shipped in june 1991 and got hungry for drive space immediately, which made diskdoubler indispensable on every classic mac that wanted to fit one more piece of software on its 80mb drive.

salient sold to fifth generation systems in 1992. fifth generation sold to symantec a year later, and the product became norton diskdoubler pro. symantec did what symantec usually did with acquired mac utilities. it sat on the codebase and let the brand drift. by 1997 the math was working against the whole category. drive sizes were climbing and hfs was about to support per-file compression natively. the mac install base was shrinking at the same time. diskdoubler stopped being a product anyone needed to buy.

i was on the wrong side of every part of this. turkish kid on a windows pc. no mac in the house and no notion of what hfs even meant until well into university. classic mac users had a whole vocabulary for managing their hard drives in 1992 that did not cross into a turknet dial-up household. diskdoubler is one of those mac names you only meet later, in old issue archives of atpm and macworld that you read because the website is still up.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the core idea was transparent file compression at the system level. you installed diskdoubler. it added a control panel and a finder integration. from then on every file you wrote to disk got compressed in the background, and every file you opened got decompressed before the app got to see it. you did not have to think about it. a file that took 200kb uncompressed might take 100kb on disk. on an 80mb drive that mattered. the autodoubler companion product extended the idea to compress files that had not been touched in a while, freeing space as a slow background sweep.

~ the actual end ~

by 1995 the math was already lined up against diskdoubler. drives were getting cheap fast: a 1gb drive in 1996 cost what a 200mb drive cost in 1993. apple, meanwhile, was building file-level compression directly into hfs, which became the system default in 10.6 snow leopard much later but was clearly the direction even then. and symantec, the parent, had stopped investing meaningful engineering time in the mac side of its portfolio. by the time norton diskdoubler pro 1.1 shipped, the product was already over and just had not been formally retired.

~ the funny part ~

the old salient site at salientsoftware.net still exists in 2026, hosted by lloyd chambers, with a diskdoubler page that reads like a museum plaque written by the guy who made the thing. there is a section thanking guy kawasaki for the $25,000 loan that put salient in business. the macintosh garden archive has the original installers from when the floppies shipped. there is no way to actually run them on a modern mac without a classic emulator, but the bits are preserved. for an obscure compression utility from 1990 that was killed by its own success at making compression a system feature, that is more memorial than most utilities get.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »