[2] 1.8 MiB of memory is used to compress the Hutter Prize data, slightly more than gzip's slowest setting.
Most tar programs will pipe their data through compress when given the command line option "-Z".
(The tar program in its own does not compress; it just stores multiple files within one tape archive.)
Spencer Thomas of the University of Utah took this article and implemented compress in 1984, without realizing that a patent was pending on the LZW algorithm.
Joseph M. Orost led the team and worked with Thomas et al. to create the 'final' (4.0) version of compress and published it as free software to the 'net.sources' USENET group in 1985.
U.S. patent 4,558,302 was granted in 1985, and this is why compress could not be used without paying royalties to Sperry Research, which was eventually merged into Unisys.
compress has fallen out of favor in particular user-groups because it makes use of the LZW algorithm, which was covered by a Unisys patent – because of this, gzip and bzip2 increased in popularity on Linux-based operating systems due to their alternative algorithms, along with better file compression.
This bug existed for more than 35 years and was in the original UNIX compress, ncompress, gzip and the Windows port.