Jetpac (the way of the packer)
Jetpac was the name of my favorite ZX Spectrum game (see below) !
That’s also my compression program. I did that as a school project in 1996, and I learnt a lot of compression techniques there. I also implemented them in a compression pipeline where I was able to mix one technique followed by another, and so on.
Included : static and dynamic Huffman coding, static and dynamic arithmetic coding (order 0 and 1), LZW, LZ77, LZSS, RLE, Move-To-Front, Burrows-Wheeler. (I felt in love with the BW transform….)
At the time, my compression God was Charles Bloom. I remember I thought he was an old university professor with a white beard :) It was great to find out years later that he was actually around my age, and also working on 3D / games / cool stuff.