On 2 Sep 2003 at 9:43, Roger Burton West wrote: > On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 09:24:11AM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: > > >When I started computing in the 90's on PCs, it was LZH at the > >beginning, replaced by ARJ shortly after I started; now it's ZIP. (And, > >of course, the perennial .tar.Z / .tar.gz in the *nix world, though > >.tar.bz2 are starting to show up in a couple of places.) > > For a while, ARJ was looking set to displace ZIP v2; it was producing > consistently smaller files, and had just grown a solid mode (which > originated with HPack, but that's another story entirely).
That's certainly what it looked like to me in the early-mid 90's (my BBS/mailboxing days: roughly 1992-1994), where ARJ appeared to be the most popular compressed format by far. (Though my favourite mailbox switched over to SQZ due to its slightly better compression, I don't think that format ever became widespread.) I was away from computers for about 1995-1997 and was a bit surprised on my return to find that ZIP appeared to have taken over from ARJ. I can well imagine that the availability of Info-ZIP may have been part of this; another part is probably the advent of Win95 and WinZIP, which brought compression to the pointy-clicky masses. (ARJ and PKZIP had both been 16-bit command-line DOS programs, though there was third-pary software called ARJMENU which gave you a text-mode full-screen interface to ARJ, and I think PKZIP later came up with a 32-bit graphical version of their software.) > But Rob Jung insisted on keeping the source entirely closed, which > meant that instead of competing with ZIP as the "universal and > featureful" format it was competing with RAR as the "small" format, at > which it failed. I think it stood a decent chance at "featureful" if not "universal"; it certainly had a ton of features, which got more and more with each version. Compression was roughly the same, but ARJ was the first of the two to have multi-volume archives, for example, or "backup" archives storing multiple versions of the same file (it retrieved the latest version by default but you could ask for any older version as well). I think that by count of features, ARJ was probably more successful. No idea what ARJ is doing these days. They still seem to be around as a company (and have a better format called JAR, apparently), but I haven't seen an ARJ archive in many a day. I doubt they have many sales. > >This is probably not relevant > >for whoever started the thread, though. > > Neither is anything I've said here. But it's been interesting talking about it. -- Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
