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ARJ Software
- joshspankit 5y agoI remember ARJ and all the rest of the non-zip compression formats. Back then you could almost be a collector and could certainly be a connoisseur. Fascinating times.
- olvy0 5y agoYeah, I remember being so excited then whenever a new archiver would be released, and running comparisons between them, seeing which ones would compress stuff better than the other. Fun times.
- paulclinger 5y agoHa, I was doing exactly the same thing 30 years or so ago; even running comparisons between minor version releases. ARJ was doing very well compression- and performance-wise (and also had open unarj code as far as I remember).
- int_19h 5y agoI remember it was fairly typical in DOS days to have a separate directory under utilities just for the different archivers that you might need (ARJ/RAR/ZIP at the minimum, but often also ACE/ARC/ICE/LHA/UHA/ZOO).
- joshspankit 5y agoAnd the dreaded stuffit
- daneel_w 5y agoI regularly saw ARJ archives on PC BBSes in the mid 90s, next to LHZ which was most popular. At the same time the Amiga world was (and I think still is) dominated by LZX, which supplanted LHA.
- flatiron 5y agoMember ace? I think the entire 90s “scene” switched to it for a entire hot minute then back to split rars
- ulimn 5y agoOh, I loved WinAce back in the days!
- js4ever 5y agoThis brings back a lot of memories! Do you remember the multi steps decompression phases? The par2 files for repairing
- daneel_w 5y agoI do! I am also old enough to remember a few other side characters like ZOO and ARC.
- JMS2021 5y agoOr DMS with XCopy
- huhtenberg 5y agoArj was all the rage when it just came out and for some time after that. Early-to-mid-90s or thereabouts. It was a major step up from pkzip, because not only it compressed better, it could also split the archive into multiple files (making it spreadable across multiple floppies!), it could extract otherwise undamaged files from corrupted archives and had a lot of other options.
- carlivar 5y agoI also liked the command line syntax better than pkzip.
- huhtenberg 5y agoYes, that too! pkzip command line switches were a mess.
- int_19h 5y agoARJ command line was largely inherited from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(file_format) (the same was true for RAR)
- whizzter 5y agoIirc you could split files with Zip at that time as well, but the major annoyance was that you always needed to insert the last disk of the Zip set at the start. This made it so that compressing and copying between 2 computers by moving one or two disks between the computers was impossible, requiring a full set of disks.
- tom_ 5y agopkzip also wouldn't create the split archives on your hard drive. It had to actually write to the disks and experience the disk full error for itself. No fun, because you'd have to babysit the whole process, which would take longer than normal due to the compression, without knowing how many disks you'd need. You also had to just hope that none of them would turn out to have errors. With arj you could tell it you wanted each part to be whatever size would fit on a 1.44 MB DOS disk, leave it going, then do the copy-to-disk step afterwards having been forewarned about how many disks you'd need.
- torh 5y agoI worked with ARJ archives well into 2015. At one point I studied the format to see if it was possible to change the filenames in the archive without unpacking/repacking. It was. And I did. To be fair, I had ~230k files I had to "manipulate", so even automating a unpack/repack would have cost too much time and energy.
- conradfr 5y agoVery nostalgic! My first software was an arj.exe frontend (in French) for Windows 95. I just launched it! https://i.imgur.com/HfgleBq.png https://i.imgur.com/HfgleBq.png Of course, it's because ARJ was the standard for warez back in these days... edit: It was coded in a language called "Visual DialogScript", which amazingly kind of still exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_DialogScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_DialogScript
- statictype 5y agoI remember Visual Dialogscript! I taught myself how to program but couldn’t figure out how to make GUI apps and couldnt afford a Visual Studio license (this is before I discovered pirated sites). I ended up using Visual Dialogscript. Amazed that this still exists.
- billylo 5y agoSupports Windows Millenium! :-)
- theandrewbailey 5y agoI hope it's Y2K compliant!
- maxmalkav 5y agoIn a similar fashion than other people here, my first contact with ARJ was via a copy of Doom compressed and split into several floppies. Some years ago I remembered out of the blue ARJ and checked their site (the one this submission is about). It was nice to see they were still around. I am the kind of person that love the "About" sections and I could not resist to check their "Our Philosophy" one: http://www.arjsoftware.com/phil.htm http://www.arjsoftware.com/phil.htm: From the beginning, our family decided that God would be the senior partner in our company and that our business practices would strive to reflect the principles that He has so graciously provided to the world in His Word. I am not used to people bringing religion into IT related stuff, I was kind of surprised surprised, in a honestly curious way. (Edited to fix some format)
- ta988 5y agoOn the same vein, Zynaddsubfx used to have that on its website: "Please don't use this program to make music that is against God and Jesus Christ. Realize that the only way to the Salvation is Jesus Christ. Please don't lose this chance and don't make others to lose it!"
- dafelst 5y agoThe once ubiquitous UltraEdit text editor for Windows used to have a similar message on its website and still does to this day. I remember it being a little odd back in 1997 or so when I first started using it, especially living in relatively secular Australia. > This is our story ...to God be the glory! https://www.ultraedit.com/company/idm-full-story.html https://www.ultraedit.com/company/idm-full-story.html
- therealmarv 5y agoxmodem, ymodem, zmodem and ARJ. Good old times...
- randombits0 5y agoBimodem, baby! Upload AND download simultaneously!
- blacklion 5y agoHydra and Janus! And ZedZap instead of Z-Modem, as ZedZap is much more effective.
- olvy0 5y agoAt one point, mid 90's maybe, I got the code for the freely available unarj utility and studied it. I remember being blown away by following it and understanding how Huffman compression works. I think that was with the help of a Dr. Dobbs article or something, that was certainly before I had any CS education.
- apricot 5y agoOnce in a blue moon I'll feel nostalgic and go see if the web sites for some of my favorite software in the 1990s are still up. ARJ software is one of my regular stops, and so are Semware [1] (I basically lived in QEdit, back in the day) and JP Software [2] (makers of the 4DOS shell). [1] http://www.semware.com/ http://www.semware.com/ [2] https://jpsoft.com/ https://jpsoft.com/
- twh270 5y agoI haven't thought about either of those in a long time, thanks for the little detour down memory lane!
- WhitneyLand 5y agoIt’s fun example of vintage software bootstrapping. Love the homemade logo and the gradient fill header showing stripes so it could “save bandwidth” by fitting into a 256-color gif.
- mickeyp 5y agoIn school, back in the early 90s, I was one of the few who'd acquired the eldritch knowledge of making arj compressed files span multiple floppy disks automatically. You see, you needed that if you wanted to copy the pirated games that inevitably got installed on the school's DOS computers. Fun memories.
- omgmajk 5y agoAh nostalgia... pirate nostalgia...
- 29athrowaway 5y agoBack in the 90s, a good software to use along with ARJ was F-Prot. MSAV was complete wack, same as its successor Windows Defender.
- marcodiego 5y agoOff topic: anyone knows a libre RAR5 decompressor? I know PeaZip does it, but it has no CLI.
- huqedato 5y agoBack to the nineties... before Linux, I used to love Ms-DoS.