[ Thanks to linuxaria for this link.
]
“GNU Gzip is a popular data compression program originally
written by Jean-loup Gailly for the GNU project. Mark Adler wrote
the decompression part.“gzip is any of several software applications used for file
compression and decompression. The term usually refers to the GNU
Project’s implementation of such a tool using Lempel-Ziv coding
(LZ77), for which it stands for GNU zip. The program was created by
Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for
the compress program used in early Unix systems, and intended for
use by the Project. Version 0.1 was first publicly released on
October 31, 1992, and version 1.0 followed in February 1993.“gzip is based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which is a combination
of LZ77 and Huffman coding. DEFLATE was intended as a replacement
for LZW and other patent-encumbered data compression algorithms
which, at the time, limited the usability of compress and other
popular archivers.”