Re: what gives??

This we can test!  There is certainly nothing proprietary about gzip.

I still have the original .tar file.  (It's on a machine in my lab
now.)

I will go there tomorrow, turn it on, download it back to my home
machine, reconstruct the original file, AFTER GZIPPING, it was
something like 26xMB, as I recall.

And then:

Apply split.  And publish listings of the before sizes (all but the
last one MUST BE 1MB each, that's what "-b1m" does of course.  As I
recall, the last file was about 315k.

Then I gzipped the resulting file segments, (which had names like xaa,
xab,...)

Producing files like xaa.gz, xab.gz   And this isn't rocket science.

My point is that two of these files (after gzipping) were in the 800kb
range.  What size exactly, I don't remember, so in my previous note, I
split the diference, calling on 825k and the other 875k.