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I remember being so excited when the zip format came out. Prior to zip, we suffered with the arc format. At 2400 baud, the difference in compression was very ve
by ttul 7y ago
I remember being so excited when the zip format came out. Prior to zip, we suffered with the arc format. At 2400 baud, the difference in compression was very very significant.
- teddyh 7y agoI always preferred ARJ; I remember it having both better compression and more useful options than ZIP.
- gdy 7y agoAnd later came RAR
- vasili111 7y agoAnd now 7z.
- friedegg 7y agoRAR was great at the time because it offered "solid" archiving like a tar/gz combo. Zip and ARJ both compressed at the file level rather than the archive level.
- teddyh 7y ago> Zip and ARJ both compressed at the file level rather than the archive level. No. You may be thinking of gzip, a spiritual successor and replacement for the Unix compress/uncompress (and even earlier pack/unpack). But both ZIP and ARJ, and the earlier ARC, all made multiple-file archives. Or did you mean that the compression was “carried over” from file to file inside the archive?
- gdy 7y agoThe latter.
- gdy 7y agoAnd now, IMHO, it is great because of its Fastest mode - it is really fast and at the same time compresses quite well.
- ttul 7y agoARJ came after ZIP. Us poor eighties kids had to suffer with ARC.
- speeder 7y agoWhen I was a kid someone gave me a game compressed with ARJ... Internet didn't existed yet in my country, took me 3 years to figure out how to open that file, and in the meantime I infected my computers multiple times with tons of viruses (seemly packing viruses in unzippers was popular... the one with most viruses was "pkunzip" or something like that)
- chrisstanchak 7y agoYea but when you got on a bbs that supported zmodem transfers...