On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Rob Landley <[email protected]> wrote: > It was one of those tools like arj and binkleyterm that and zmodem that > were just there, free downloads that didn't do enough shareware begathon > popups to make them unusable. (There were buckets of these, zip comes > from pkzip, which was cloned as infozip by the non-dos crowd...)
Well, they weren't that obscure at the time. Phil Katz got his start releasing improved versions of Seaware's Arc archiver products. His versions were compatible with Arc but faster and with better compression. Seaware sued him (I think it was the first time one ASP author sued another), and Phil shifted to PKZip. Mindful that Seaware sued over use of a copyrighted proprietary archive format, Phil explicitly made the Zip format public domain, so anyone could write tools using it. PKWare is still around, selling and supporting Zip based products on a variety of platforms. Phil, alas, is not. He essentially drank himself to death in 2000. IIRC, Sam Smith, well known in the PC BBS world, did the main port of Zip and Unzip to InfoZip. I used Arj, Zmodem, and Binkleyterm back in the MSDOS days. There were a plethora of archivers, with PKZip the best, Zmodem was a no-brainer pick over Xmodem and Ymodem for dial up transfers, and if you wanted to be a Fido node, chances are you used Binkley as your front end mailer. (I have had the odd with Fido folk pointing the the design is modeled after Usenet, and front end mailers were work-arounds for systems that only did one thing at a time.) ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 _______________________________________________ Toybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net
