Stacker

» see stac.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 1995 i was 11 years old, three years from my first modem, and the only thing i was compressing was a school folder onto a floppy. stacker was already past peak. by 1998 when i actually got my home pc online, the era of selling software to double the size of your hard drive was a closed museum exhibit. but the lawsuit it left behind is one of the most important moments in microsoft's history.

stac electronics started in 1983 as a small caltech-graduate compression specialist in carlsbad, california. the consumer breakthrough came in 1990 with stacker for dos, a transparent disk compressor that intercepted file system calls and stored data at roughly 2 to 1 ratio. for users in 1991 with a 40 megabyte hard drive, this doubled their disk overnight. for stac it was a top-ten dos software product for three years running.

microsoft watched the market and decided it wanted in. ms-dos 6.0 shipped in march 1993 with doublespace, which did the same thing as stacker. stac sued for patent infringement, the case went to a san diego jury in february 1994, and the jury awarded stac 120 million dollars in damages. microsoft counter-won 13.6 million for trade secret use by stac. ms-dos 6.21 had to ship without compression for a few months while microsoft renegotiated. the settlement included a 40 million dollar microsoft investment in stac and ongoing royalties.

windows 95 launched in august 1995 with a fresh microsoft-built compression layer called drivespace, which the settlement allowed. by 1996 the stac sales pipeline had collapsed. consumer hard drives were also getting cheap fast. a 1 gigabyte drive was 200 dollars by 1996 and the value proposition of risking your filesystem on a third-party compression layer no longer added up. stac pivoted to backup software, then renamed itself previo after a help desk detour. the company dissolved in 2002 and sold its remaining assets to altiris.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the original stacker shipped on three floppies for around 100 dollars. you ran the installer, it compressed your entire c drive into a hidden container file, and on next boot your 40 megabyte drive showed up as 75. for early-90s pc users that was a real upgrade. magazines covered it and it appeared in compaq and packard bell oem bundles. for a while stacker was the best-selling utility on the dos chart.

~ the lawsuit ~

the stac vs microsoft trial in february 1994 was the first major intellectual property case microsoft lost at jury verdict. stac's lead lawyer morgan chu argued that microsoft had reviewed stacker source under nda during licensing talks, then walked away and shipped doublespace built on the same patented compression methods. the jury awarded 120 million in damages, the largest patent verdict against microsoft to that point. the settlement that followed had microsoft buying around 15 percent of stac and bundling the licensed compression into future dos versions. it was a rare moment where redmond did not get to win by default.

~ how it actually ended ~

the lawsuit money was the high point. by the time the settlement closed, the technical foundation under stac was sliding. drive prices fell while windows 95 absorbed the compression feature into the os. by 1997 manufacturers were shipping multi-gigabyte consumer units at fire-sale prices. the stac brand never recovered the appliance-vendor relevance it had in 1991. previo carried the corporate shell through the late 90s and into chapter 11 in 2002. the patents went to hi/fn and the software business went to altiris. the brand went silent.

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