Talk:Stac Electronics

Settlement details
I'd appreciate any correction to my estimate of the settlement details. Microsoft ended up saying in its 1994 10-K that it recorded a net pretax charge of $90 million to settle the Stac patent litigation. Elsewhere I have read that Microsoft invested $39.9 million in Stac, hence my claim in the article that there was a $39.9 million investment and a $50 million payment. Tempshill 18:24, 26 May 2005 (UTC)


 * There was article in Computer Reseller News on 27 JUN 94 ("Microsoft to pay $83M to settle Stac compression suit"). But embedded in an Inc. magazine article, "Patent Fending", the net payouts were $39.9M USD and $43M USD, respectively. Given INC's reputation, this is probably accurate. The other 7M USD probably went to bonuses and salaries in Microsoft's legal department for ducking the original $120M USD award! :-)  JimScott 23:27, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

doubling
was stacker better than doublespace/drivespace or was doubling and often overoptimisic estimate? Plugwash 01:07, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Having worked for Tech Support for Stacker (WAY back in 1991/92) I was under the impression that Stacker was more stable than DoubleSpace. Easier to fix if something went wrong also. Compression only really worked on Non-Graphics/Video files. In other words, it could compress a document/text/exe/com/sys file pretty good, but could not further compress graphics or video files because they are already about as compressed as could be (at that time). So these types of files seemed to take "twice" as much space on a stacked drive. Doc —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.21.162.200 (talk) 22:23, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

External References
The external reference to http://web.archive.org/web/20051214104645/http://www.altiris.com/previo/ is broken. —Preceding unsigned comment added by RodrigoValin (talk • contribs) 02:13, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Lawsuit Detail
One detail I heard about was that not only did MS steal the doubling software, they left the Stac copyright notice in the source code. Anyone have any confirmation of that? Jokem (talk) 16:20, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I too have heard such a rumour, maybe worth tracking down the information.--Bstard12 (talk) 02:08, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
 * When I worked for STAC in Software Quality Assurance (SQA) in 1993-1994, I believe we were told STAC lost the ~$14m counter-lawsuit due to "reverse engineering DoubleSpace" (which lead to to finding the patented STAC algorithm for compression). I'm not a valid source by Wikipedia standards, nor can I locate a third party source. Guy M 10:16, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Edited (10:21, 9 January 2016 (UTC))

I never heard anything about the Stac copyright notice being left in the source code. But then I never read all the trial transcripts. One main issue was they left in part of the patented compression algorithm that was subsequently removed in Stacker because it was found to worsen the compression rate. Also as far as I know, DoubleSpace was never looked at when developing the algorithm. I don't know if the people coding the software version of Stacker looked at it to see how it hooked into the OS, but the algorithm itself was designed before DoubleSpace came out. The original market was quarter-inch cartridge tape drives which Stac was heavily involved in at the time through its chip business. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.215.138.231 (talk) 00:27, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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