Some time ago, the question of the oldest executable compression tool came up. EXEPACK was identified as a widespread and unexpectedly troublemaking specimen, but Realia SpaceMaker was reportedly older.
Only initially no one could come up with surviving executables compressed with SpaceMaker that were demonstrably older than EXEPACK (leave alone find old versions of SpaceMaker itself), although there were several unconfirmed hints that early versions of Norton Utilities used SpaceMaker.
Eventually an old executable compressed with SpaceMaker turned up: DVED.COM from September 1983, pre-dating the 1984 EXEPACK. But did Norton Utilities really use SpaceMaker?
Jeff Parsons of pcjs.org has now unearthed excellent circumstantial evidence: On floppies distributed with the Summer 1983 copies of the PC Disk Magazine, there were utilities authored by Peter Norton (though not specifically anything from the Norton Utilities). And those executables by Peter Norton were compressed with SpaceMaker.
In the meantime, the OS/2 Museum came into the possession of an image of an actual Norton Utilities 2.01 floppy. The files on the floppy are dated July 4, 1983, and yes, most of them are compressed with SpaceMaker. They contain the ‘MEMORY$’ signature near the beginning, and a decompression stub at the end. The rumors about Norton Utilities and SpaceMaker were true.
At this point, it is then known that yes, Peter Norton really used SpaceMaker for early Norton Utilities, and yes, SpaceMaker is really quite a bit older than EXEPACK; SpaceMaker may be considered the oldest known executable compression utility.
