
Re: Sounds like a good idea
> compressing alpha-numeric characters
That rang a bell, and nobody's doing anything useful, so I got off the shelf a 1980 diary which I used as a notebook during the subsequent year or so. On the page for 4 February I have hand-compiled a 31-byte routine for the MCS 6502 which unpacks 4 6-bit wide characters from a 3-byte package, and on the next page a 27-byte routine to do the reverse, saving 25% on RAM. I'm typing on a machine with 8,589,934,592 bytes of RAM, though, so I don't think I'll fire up the emulator to check my hand-coding!