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pkzip 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, b

by tom_ 5y ago

pkzip 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.

gordaco 5y ago
You could also do this with RAR. I always used the same command (which I could still recite up to the last character) to create compressed files of the size of a floppy, which I believed to be exactly 1423.5 kilobytes. Then again, I'm not sure where did this number come from. I think I used the first disk I could find as a sample, but maybe that disk had some faulty sectors and the amount in a healthy disk was slightly higher. I remember, back in the day, trying all the compressors I had at hand to see which one compressed the most. Possibly one of my first truly self-researched bit of computer knowledge... not very impressive, but then again this was the mid-90s and I was like 13. I believe that the answer was something like RAR > WinRAR > ARJ > PKZip > WinZip, with the difference between RAR and WinRAR, and between PKZip and WinZip, being very small, and the other two gaps being higher. I probably botched some settings regarding compression levels, so it's likely that I didn't use the best compression level for some of the compressors.