On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 10:55:13AM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: >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.)
Yup, but it was more expensive than WinZIP (which of course was based on Info-ZIP) and nagged the user more about registration. ARJ never went graphical at all AFAIK, and neither did JAR. >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. It won on "featureful", but that wasn't enough to get it used. >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. And of course it was tested a bit more thoroughly before it was released. Anyone remember PKZip 2.04e? The (plain-text) bug list was longer than the executable... >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. JAR was available in 1996 or so, I think. I still have copies of most of the archivers and compressors I was playing with in those days... anyone remember UC2? HA? SAR? ACB? Roger
