> When I owned an Amiga they kept on changing the archive format to find a better one that saved space. It happened on DOS too: ZIP, ARJ, RAR, ... That was ba

> When I owned an Amiga they kept on changing the archive format to find a better one that saved space. It happened on DOS too: ZIP, ARJ, RAR, ... That was back on the days of floppy disks (which usually had at most 1440 KiB) and small hard disks (a few tens of megabytes). Even a few kilobytes could make a huge difference. As storage and transfer speeds grew, "wasting" a few kilobytes is no longer that much of an issue, and other considerations like compatibility become more important. Furthermore, many new file formats have their own internal compression, so compressing them again gains almost nothing regardless of the compression algorithm. The reason both ZIP and GZIP became ubiquitous is, IMO, that the compression algorithm both use (DEFLATE) was released as guaranteed to be patent-free, back in a time where IIRC most of the alternatives were either patented or compressed worse. As a consequence, everything that needed a lossless compression method chose DEFLATE (examples: the HTTP protocol, the PNG file format, and so on).