The new data compression software HOBPACK developed by HOB is said to slim down host data volume promising significant cuts in data transmission costs.

Zirndorf, 16. December 1998. An increase in data transmission speed of up to 90% is said to be achieved with HOBPACK, the latest addition to German HOB’s sizeable portfolio of mainframe software.

HOBPACK has been specifically designed to compress data and text between IBM mainframes and PCs and

consists of a host and a client component to optimize data compression between MVS or VM based IBM Mainframes and PCs. As PC Client HOB's products HOBLink 3270 and HOBLink RJE can be used, which provide a comfortable way of compressing and decompressing in a process that is automatically running in the background.

The host components are available for VM/CMS and MVS/TSO. Both include a combination of the powerful compression algorithms Run Length & Lempel/Ziv Huffman. The PC modules provide data compression of all Windows types (WIN16, WIN32, Windows 95 and NT as well as OS/2.

The user can select from 8 available conversion tables, including the major code pages such as EBCDIC US, EBCDIC German and WIN ANSI. These in return can be customized user specifically to account for international code pages.

HOBPACK is targeted at development enterprises as well as to customers with development potentials: The HOBPACK compression functions can be easily integrated into other products. The required sub programs to enable these functions are provided by HOB as object-files (VM, VSE and MVS as well as all PC operating systems).