What are compressed and uncompressed files, how does it all work and why compressed files take less storage?
In: Technology
For the kind of compression that’s typical in something like a zip file, it’s a combination of two different approaches. (Computer people, this is an ELI5, so please don’t jump in and say “well akshulally, it’s not letters, it’s bits”.)
Anyway, imagine you’re writing an email where you have to pay by the letter:
First, if there’s something you’ve already said and you have to repeat yourself, just refer back to what you already said. For example, instead of, “Yesterday I saw a red car and a blue car and today I saw a red car and a blue car,” you can say, “yesterday I saw a red car and a blue car and today, the same.”
Second, use a shorthand where the more common words you use have less letters in them and the less common words maybe have more letters, like saying “t” instead of “the”, but “t2” whenever you actually mean “t”, so the net number of letters is less. (“I wrote the letter T.” becomes “I wrote t letter T2.” saving one letter.)
Voila, your email is shorter.
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