The Disk Masher System was an often used method on Amiga

Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

, to create a compressed

Data compression

In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....

 image of a disk (usually floppy

Floppy disk

A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...

). The disk is read block

Block (data storage)

In computing , a block is a sequence of bytes or bits, having a nominal length . Data thus structured are said to be blocked. The process of putting data into blocks is called blocking. Blocking is used to facilitate the handling of the data-stream by the computer program receiving the data...

-by-block, and thus its data structure is maintained. DMS won approval particularly in the demo scene

Demoscene

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...

 and the Warez scene

Warez

Warez refers primarily to copyrighted works distributed without fees or royalties, and may be traded, in general violation of copyright law. The term generally refers to unauthorized releases by organized groups, as opposed to file sharing between friends or large groups of people with similar...

, since with this tool, disk images could generally be transferred easily with telecommunication

Telecommunication

Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...

 modem

Modem

A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...

s to mailbox networks like FidoNet

FidoNet

FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems. It was most popular in the early to mid 1990s, prior to the introduction of easy and affordable access to the Internet...

for efficient distribution.

The DiskMasher format is copyright-protected and has problems storing particular bit sequences due to bugs in the compression algorithm, but was widely used in the pirate and demo scenes. To avoid these issues, a number of other disk compressors were developed that used alternative disk reading and compression methods, for instance, xDM.