LZX

LZX is a data compression algorithm in the LZ77 family, described as a slightly improved version of DEFLATE, and it is also the name of a file archiver of the same name. Both were invented by Jonathan Forbes and Tomi Poutanen in the 1990s while they were studying at the University of Waterloo. The Amiga archiver was publicly released in 1995 as shareware, and in 1997 the authors released a free keyfile once they had stopped work on it. In 1996 Forbes joined Microsoft, where the algorithm was added to the cabinet archiver with a variable search window and a preprocessor that converts x86 call instructions to absolute addresses to improve compression of binary code. Microsoft later used LZX in Compressed HTML Help files, Reader LIT files, Windows Imaging Format files, CompactOS file compression in Windows 10 and Xbox Live Avatars.