The Troubled Origins of .ZIP | Nostalgia Nerd

People REALLY don't like paying for software.....it has always been so.

Wouldn't you believe that the ZIP compression program built-in to Windows was actually created as a side job hustle of one of the Microsoft's employees? Dave Plummer is the creator of the ZIP utility in Windows. He also created the Task Manager, but that was actually first meant to be an insider utility for the developers, Dave spread the word among devs and provided them the floppy disks with the utility, but people in charge actually saw an opportunity in it and decided that it would be immensely useful for end users as well, so Dave kind of cleaned it up a little bit, gave it a nicer facade so it fits in Windows better, and published it into the main source tree. And so we can thank Dave for these amazing utilities.

This boils my blood that the community went with the guy who just stole the source code

Any insight on the rise of "winzip" and the use of the ZIP format for Windows as "compressed folders"?

TL;DR

The zip format was created by someone who infringed on copyright by doing copy-paste. Who then created the zip format to further screw over the people she had wronged

The claim of identical comments in the source is a lie. The "independent court appointed expert", as wikipedia likes to call him, was not appointed by the court, and was actually a close associate of Thom's who only started making this claim after settlement. And his version of events changes every hour. Thom has no case here. He got beaten by a better product. Also, you should really do your research before you talk authoratively about subjects you don't understand. You don't even get the SEA acronym right. Do you even read the script you're given?

ZIP, besides being a great format, also has the benefit of being a verb ;) which greatly helps with its adoptation. IIRC PKunzip can also decompress ARC files. But rather peculiarly, in the 1990s, ZIP still had to compete with LHA and RAR for popularity, though I've only encountered LHA files from ahem less legitimate sources. Despite RAR being far less reliable and more annoying to work with, thanks to the proprietary and poorly coded client, to this day you'll encounter people who argue that RAR is a better format, even though in a multi-file RAR archive, the slightest corruption means the entire archive is unusable, while ZIP can to some degree recover the lost data

I remember that ARC was rarely used back then. I’d be put off if a program was archived with it. I preferred to use PKzip at the time.

Didn't tar, xz, and gzip-compressed tar win? Aside from Windows letting you compress to zip within Explorer, everything I see is a tar.gz or tar.xz.

Zip is widely used with Windows, but in the unix world most of us use compressed tarballs.

Such a shame he didn't develop PKZIP on Windows. He let an absolute turd of a program, "WinZip" rise to dominance. It was initially a GUI wrapper on his own application. It would have been cheap and easy to contract out even that simple of an implementation. WinZip had a terrible UI and aggressively made users wait with a timeout to extract files. Not only that, it was installed often, even when Microsoft included built-in ZIP format support in Windows.

As someone who lives entirely in the FOSS world of Linux and runs no proprietary software(I do run games but ONLY in an isolated container) this weird proprietary nonsense of paying for compression utilities in the 90s just seems so weird

So whose side are you on here? 🤔😅

get rid of the fuking background noise

Long live ARJ and YMODEM-G

How do you postulate that Zip won? In the scene, I’ll let you get which one, RAR was far more efficient in compressing large files as well as its ability to split the file into many volumes that are sequential and easily decompressed back to full size. Far easier than anything zip had and way smaller files in many cases.

I remember an almost instantaneous switch from the arc to the zip format with the impression the community had determined that arc had crossed the line into forcing its format down the throats of the users in order to increase profit. Pretty soon it was 'arc who?'

ZIP is OK but RAR is the best. back in my DOS days, using command line to type switches, source & zip target, using RAR has midnight commander type interface. on top of that, im able to create SFX and span it across multiple files so it will fit to floppy disks. i dont remember PKZIP have that kind of feature until Windows comes and WinZIP was made. Even that, i still use WinRAR. it can access pretty much every compressed archive file

and arj?

I remember those days with fondness.... BBS's where the bomb and I even was a sysop of my one for a while. I got quite used to pkarc and pkzip and now use gzip/gunzip often on Unix platforms.

For me the origins of Zip came from the song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah from Disney movie Song of the South

I just use .RAR files. .ZIP is overrated and mainstream.

In the pirate scene of the early 2000s the ARC format was used to compress the graphics and sounds of games. I guess the arc format was very liked by pirates.

Speaking of archive programs, why is 7z so hard to work with?

This made my memories of the Apple side of compression through the years, from Apple ][ to Macs come back. StuffIt (.sit, .sitx) was the closest Mac equivalent to ZIP in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the dominant format for software distribution, especially shareware. StuffIt generally had better compression rates than ZIP, especially for Mac-specific files that included resource forks. The Apple][s had ShrinkIt (1987) – The most popular compression utility for the Apple II series, similar to Zip. It created .SHK files, used for compressing and archiving software.  

With the rise of Unix-based macOS, built-in compression tools became standard:
• Apple Archive Utility (Built-in, since Mac OS X 10.3) – Handles .zip, .tar, .gzip, .bz2, etc.
• Tar (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz) – Unix-based archiving for Mac power users.

Just like today , emotions turned the evil into a hero , and multiplied the abuse.

As a former BBS Sysop, this video was quite a blast from the past. I didn't realize until this how small SEA was as a corporation. I really thought at the time that it was the David of Katz vs the Goliath of SEA. Sad Mr. Katz died at such a young age. I suppose this situation would become a classic case study for a definition of a Pyrrhic victory.

One interesting thing was I never found a 32bit (NT) executable of lharc. There was a bound executable, meaning it had both a DOS and an OS/2 executable in one. Since Windows NT had an OS/2 subsystem it would use the OS/2 part of the executable.

I remember when all of this was going down. Almost all BBS managers went to PKZip within a few days.

Are you sure that's Irene and didn't switch clips?

I grew up in the greater Milwaukee area during the BBS era and ran across Phil Katz frequently on many of the local boards.

My first exposure to archives was with .PAK files

Uh oh. You said Univ Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but showed a flyover of Univ Wisconsin (the big flagship campus in Madison). The cheeseheads will be coming for you now. 😊

.7z won in my heart

SEA had a fidget spinner in their logo

There’s even (or was) an OS level compressor built into Mac OS X using the ZIP format.
Prior to that, freeware & shareware utility were available for compression & decompression of ZIP files on “classic” Mac OS. One of the best was StuffIt which could handle many different formats….i relied on that for several years!

…..not to be confused with Iomega Zip data cartridges.

Occurred to me to plug these shareware prices into an inflation calculator.
Multiply the shareware price by 3 or 4 to roughly equate what it would cost in today's dollars.
One suddenly realizes that a lot of software was very expensive for the time.

The really useful feature of zip format to me is that you can apply an archive comment to the file. This is super useful for things like testing where you do some automated testing and want to put the results somewhere. Sure you could make a file like "TESTRESULTS.txt" and embed that in the zip but for me it was nice that I could put the results into the archive comment via the -z option.

As Bob Hope might say, "Thanks for the memories". PKZip was magic at the time when a 1.1MB IBM floppy disk circa 1986 cost $10 (in 2025, $30 adjusted for inflation) PKZip was a money saver.

Ah the good ol pkz204g.exe

How did TAR and ARJ tie into this?

Funny thing is now that ZIP files have become a convenient wrapper for multiple files, many being larger than the actual files contained within.

Did I stop by to thank you for the shout out? Thanks.

Meh... zip files were okay for their time, back in the 90s on Windows systems. I haven't touched them since I switched to Linux in 2004-2006 though, they really are terrible and feel incredibly out of place on UNIX-like systems. And now, decades later, their compression level is practically a joke as well.

I'll take tar with a good quality compression over zip or 7-zip any day.

Now I know from where that arc compression relic from Debian packaging come.

all i get from these videos is that microshaht should have been sued out of trading