gzip is a lossless😀 file compression tool famous for making large chunks of data smaller🧩. The files on a computer are represented by bits on a silicon chip but they often take up more space than is necessary🚀.
For example when you write your screenplay in a text document📄 you produce a bunch of repeated patterns👻. Many years ago computer scientists realized we were wasting space and wrote algorithms like Lz77 to address this problem by looping over the contents of a file to identify repeated sequences👨💻 that can be replaced with metadata or shorter sequences thus reducing the total amount of bits required to represent the information.
Most importantly no information is lost😀 this differs from lossy compression algorithms like jpeg which can make an image file smaller but the information is lost in the process.
gzip was developed by Jean luc and Mark Alder👨🏻🤝👨🏻 in 1992 because the big evil tech corporations held the patents📄 on existing compression technology their implementation is based on the deflate compression algorithm which is a combination of lz77 and Huffman coding.
gzip is not the only game in town🎮 and other formats like zip, 7zip and rar solve similar problems.
On the web gzip is the most common way to implement end-to-end🔚 compression where a file is compressed on the server then decompressed by the browser to reduce the amount of data sent over the network🥅.
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