The Troubled Origins of .ZIP | Nostalgia Nerd
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3 жыл бұрынThe first 1000 people who click the link will get 2 free months of Skillshare Premium: skl.sh/nostalgianerd09201... PKWare, PKZIP, PKUNZIP, these are all names which mean something significant to me. For most of the 90s, the PK tools were probably the most frequently used in my toolbox. Compressing Doom from my mate's PC across several floppy disks, creating my own VB installers, downloading data from bulletin boards or the early internet. It was an essential compression/decompression tool. But, the story of its origins is a little more tarnished than perhaps you would expect. If you've hard of SEA and their ARC file format, you might already know. Let's dive in.
Thanks to Tony Zinicola, Jr. for emailing me regarding this story. If you have any stories you want covered, email me at peter [at] nostalgianerd.com
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📜 Resources 📜
USENet discussion on Google Groups: groups.google.com/g/comp.sys....
Legal Complaint filing: www.textfiles.com/computers/ar...
Andrew Foray Obituary: www.esva.net/~thom/Andy/Obitua...
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Some material in this video may be used under Fair Dealing / Fair Use. Where under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 (UK: Sections 29 and 30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988), allowance is made for purposes including parody, quotation, criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, education and research. Fair Dealing / Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.
@Nostalgianerd 3 жыл бұрын
BBS: The Documentary is essential viewing, if you haven't already seen it. Check out www.bbsdocumentary.com/ or watch the entire documentary through Jason Scott's playlist at kzfaq.info/get/bejne/esqUlchqtNuufIk.html. You can follow Jason on Twitter at twitter.com/textfiles
@ncb4_69 3 жыл бұрын
love from ' #BHAI ' (BRO)
@mactruck1882 3 жыл бұрын
A a q 8 tqqQ
@BrianRRenfro 3 жыл бұрын
And after watching BBS: The Doc everyone make sure to check out another Jason Scott doc, Get Lamp.
@boblister6174 3 жыл бұрын
@@Riskteven UC2 as well it had higher compressed then both arc and zip back then but never got traction because it wasn't super fast. I still have a copy kicking around on a floppy somewhere.
@sergeleon1163 3 жыл бұрын
Remember using PKware back in the day, although also in early 90's using ARJ and been an early adaptor of RAR
@callmeNuzi 3 жыл бұрын
You didn't mention Gary Conway who contributed largely to the code and creation of PKZIP. Who is literally a co-creator of the .ZIP format. He is still alive and responds when reached out to and could offer a lot of first hand knowledge for this video.
@Versuffe 2 жыл бұрын
Conway’s game of life… That name gives me GOL vibes
@Vlr 2 жыл бұрын
@@Versuffe not the same Conway, but yeah! That one’s John ;)
@luiswittrock223 2 жыл бұрын
@@Vlr rip
@runakovacs4759 2 жыл бұрын
@@Vlr Lots of amazing Conways in computer Science. John Conway, Gary Conway, Lynn Conway. The Conway name is blessed
@underthestarsgamingandtech9973 3 жыл бұрын
In 1989 I worked for a Louisville Kentucky company called Infinity Design Concepts and we co-developed the ZIP format and wrote an entire assembly program compatible with PKZIP and PKUNZIP. My boss Gary spoke to Phil Katz during ZIP development, especially when we found that his PKUNZIP program would not unzip files compressed by our beta version program. It was then discovered that for extra speed PKZIP used only a pre-defined set of compression tables while we were generating dynamic tables based on the input file. At that point, PK provided us the specs of his fixed tables so our later released program also produced files PKZIP could still unzip. I was told I was one of just a few people in the world who understood how that data compression worked. 🙂 Cool history, right?
@starflow90210 Жыл бұрын
u such smarty, wow. whos a good boi?
@maritoguionyo Жыл бұрын
@@starflow90210 🥺
@JMM57 8 ай бұрын
wow thats awesome I love hearing stories about developers and their journey to create what they create
@bugzycapone 3 жыл бұрын
Winzip, it really whips the Llamas ass. Oh wait...can we get a WINAMP video?
@SelecaoOfMidas 3 жыл бұрын
I second this request.
@KowboyUSA 3 жыл бұрын
The _Llama's Ass Whipper Academy_ recently released a 5.8 beta.
@thecolorfox 3 жыл бұрын
@@KowboyUSA It's been out for a while now. I find it to be far more buggy and less compatible with plugins and file formats than 5.66 was, so I prefer 5.66.
@tonysolar284 3 жыл бұрын
IF so.. include Null Installer.
@kozad86 3 жыл бұрын
Ooh, and Winamp is allegedly getting revived too.
@ModernVintageGamer 3 жыл бұрын
you've been killing it lately with these videos.. great stuff
@TheGamingComputerBomb 3 жыл бұрын
Interesting seeing you here
@sugaryhull9688 3 жыл бұрын
Nice seeing you here, mate!
@genericmememan1131 3 жыл бұрын
Well well well, good to see that you watch these too. Makes me feel better 😂
@wojiaobill 3 жыл бұрын
Meeeeeeooooooowww
@cheaterman49 3 жыл бұрын
Agreed! And so do you!
@MadsterV 3 жыл бұрын
I once found this compressor which had an incredible ratio. I ran a few tests and they worked fine. It was beating zip by a factor of 10 or more (this was ages ago so not sure). I decided to take the plunge and store some data using it, stashed the disks and didn't think about it in a year or so. When I needed these files again, in a new computer, I installed the utility and got my disks and started the decompression process.... and it failed time and time again. I researched again, and found that it was just hiding a copy in the hard disk and writing the path in the "compressed" file. A scam. I lost that data. Does anyone remember that one? I forgot it's name.
@vylbird8014 3 жыл бұрын
It's not just one: There were a few programs like that.
@MadsterV 3 жыл бұрын
@@vylbird8014 oh man
@diamondsmasher 3 жыл бұрын
RIP those 10 GB of porn
@vwestlife 3 жыл бұрын
I remember hearing about that data compression scam, but also forgot its name.
@bravestarr8373 3 жыл бұрын
@@Etcher lol Mandy. A blast from the past.
@lawrencedoliveiro9104 3 жыл бұрын
ZIP has become so successful, it is also being used in places you might not recognize. It has become a common universal container for all kinds of document formats, e.g.: * ODF files (ISO 26300 office documents), the native format of LibreOffice * ZAE files (containing Collada DAE data and associated image textures etc) * Java JAR (class library) files and their offshoot, Android APK (application package) files Languages like Python and Java include ZIP handling routines in their standard libraries.
@ZlothZloth 3 жыл бұрын
Yep, so does .Net. Send any Word .docx file to Notepad. The first two letters will be "PK".
@mityaboy4639 3 жыл бұрын
funny how comments give more details about zip’s real domination than the video which supposed to address it :)
@katrinabryce 3 жыл бұрын
Microsoft Office files are also zips. Appx package files from the Microsoft Store are zips.
@apmcd47 3 жыл бұрын
... and coming from a Unix background, I find Java's jar utility more intuitive to use than Zip!
@ContractCAD 3 жыл бұрын
A long time ago my ‘daily driver’ CAD software went from a project folder to a single file format. It took me two minutes to figure out they just zipped the project files!
@avialexander 3 жыл бұрын
Crazy. My dad used to tell me the story of taking an interview with Phil to join him as a programmer, as they were both UWM alumni and knew each other beforehand, and how the interview was conducted inside their home with Phil and his mom. He said the whole thing came off very awkward and weird, and that Phil seemed to have a very hard time interacting with people so most of the interview was conducted by his mom. I'm not sure at what time in the story this interview took place, but he declined their offer, and after seeing all this that was definitely the right decision!
@Ytrearneindre 3 жыл бұрын
Are you sure? 13:40 "..this led PKware to become a multi-million dollar company"
@theunnamedfeeling3754 3 жыл бұрын
Ytrearneindre If Phil had decided to “borrow” some code from an even bigger company, they’d sue your pants off. He might have been a bit of a liability.
@mrkitty777 3 жыл бұрын
Was Phil like Terry Davis from TempleOS ?
@acertainshape 3 жыл бұрын
He should have taken the job.
@ssl3546 3 жыл бұрын
This video was pure propaganda for SEA. It makes it seem like ZIP was just a knockoff of something SEA invented. The deflate algorithm (in ZIP 2.0) is ENTIRELY invented by Phil Katz and THAT is why ZIP is popular today. Because pretty much every other compression algorithm up to then is either under a cloud of patent encumberment or not as good. Even now deflate is used everywhere because it is so much faster than anything which is tighter. MOREOVER Phil Katz had the foresight to make ZIP into a streaming compatible format. Many file formats need to have offsets computed and written into headers which means the file can't be created incrementally, it all has to be stored on a scratch disk first. A huge advantage in the age of the internet. PKARC was a lot faster than ARC because Phil Katz was a great programmer and rewrote SEA's code. Yes he used their PUBLICLY AVAILABLE code as a framework for his program but the reason the BBS community rallied around him was that his program was so much better. He could have rewritten the whole thing from scratch but he didn't see a point to it. Hard to see this as not SEA being an "indian giver."
@Nikedemos 3 жыл бұрын
15:58 It's so bizzarre seeing a mid-90's style website with Coronavirus resource links. It's like a time traveller did it for a joke to mess with us in the future
@timfischer 2 жыл бұрын
Holy crap I didn't even see that. I thought that was an archived copy of their 90s site.
@bon12121 Жыл бұрын
Virus's have existed for like probably hundreds of thousands of years, probably million. We've only been able to sequence them like in the last 50 years.
@rubansrirambabu7771 Жыл бұрын
I went to the website out of curiosity, and it is still functioning. Good to know that there are people out there who still stick to the 90s aesthetic.
@Nikedemos Жыл бұрын
@@rubansrirambabu7771 neat, good to know 2 years later!
@CattleRustlerOCN 2 ай бұрын
A "corona virus" is nothing new, it was named based on its visible (microscopic) structure and is the carrier structure for certain illnesses including the "common cold". It has been known to science for many decades.
@negirno 3 жыл бұрын
It's hilarious (and sad) that how the Internet community could be turned against somebody who they view as a threat. Countless lives have been (and still is) ruined by them, while megacorporations survive and thrive...
@ZlothZloth 3 жыл бұрын
The internet community or the BBS community? Or maybe the AOL/Compu$erve/GEnie communities?
@MrJest2 3 жыл бұрын
@@ZlothZloth "The internet community or the BBS community?" Both; I remember the debate raging across USENET at the time as well. And FidoNet had several nodes with integrated internet portals as well, sort of running "betwixt and between" both worlds at times.
@rricci 3 жыл бұрын
Not hust the "Internet community". Mainstream media also turn against people, often creating "pop justice" which is wrong more times that it being right. And, instead of apologizing, the media moves on to the next story. Disgusting! Is FidoNet still around?
@MrJest2 3 жыл бұрын
@@rricci Yep. There's still a small but passionate FidoNet community, and still a fair number of dial-up BBSs out there, too.
@rricci 3 жыл бұрын
@@MrJest2 I don't think dial-ups will ever disappear. I may (once I get my desktop up and running) get a phone modem and o.n...c......e...... .........a.............g..............a.............i............n............... .........................e...........................x..................p..........................e....................r........................i.........................e.........................n......................c..........................e...............CARRIER LOST. ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@spaicersoda7165 3 жыл бұрын
if you open a .zip file as a text file, it has the letters "PK" at the start and the end.
@vylbird8014 3 жыл бұрын
No, only the start. The last thing in the file is the index, which is why opening a truncated archive is so difficult.
@spaicersoda7165 3 жыл бұрын
@@vylbird8014 oh, ok, i didn't know that
@okaro6595 3 жыл бұрын
@@vylbird8014 Each file has also a local directory entry so it is possible to fix truncated archives to the extent it at all is possible.
@Vanessinha91Pucca 3 жыл бұрын
I remember my dad had a friend with the Registered version of Wolfeinstein 3D. He could not split the files on more than 1 floppy so he had to compress it to fit 1 1.44mb floppy. PkZip compression still wasn't enough so he used ARJ and it fit :D I was happy with the result.
@CommodoreGreg 3 жыл бұрын
ARJ was the bomb. It slaughtered zip in compression ratio back in the day until one day out of nowhere the new version of pkzip "magically caught up". More phil fishiness in my opinion. I never knew why pkzip was popular at all until now.
@alicewyan 3 жыл бұрын
@@CommodoreGreg I was an ARJ fan, till the day I discovered it couldn't recover from single errors, and a single error in one floppy disk out of a 30-something floppies archive rendered the whole thing unrecoverable. I wasn't happy that day
@nagash303 3 жыл бұрын
arj was a good one! with multiple volume option. I wonder if you can do 4.7 GB arj and burn it onto several dvds.
@vladimirarnost8020 3 жыл бұрын
@@alicewyan Any archiver would fail to decompress files from a corrupted archive. Sometimes the ONE single affected file is lost (actually deleted by the decompressor to prevent you from using a corrupt file but that could be overidden). If the archive headers were corrupted, the chances at recovery were lower. Adding effective data recovery information would increase the file size so much that it would no longer be a file compression program. Have a look how CD-ROMs are designed to handle unreadable spots, scratches, fingerprints, etc. Each data bit is recorded on the medium 6 times at different places using different encodings. A typical 700 MB CD has a raw capacity of over 4 GB worth of pits. In my experience from the old days, in average, 1 floppy in each box of 10 was faulty. Truly an abysmal format. Even the good ol' Verbatim 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies were showing CRC errors sometimes. Relying on 30 disks in a row to be fully functional was quite foolish. Always verify your data after writing the data on them. It takes less time than going back and forth to make another copy. ;)
@alicewyan 3 жыл бұрын
@@vladimirarnost8020 sure, but multivolume PKZIPs and RARs were able to recover from failures somewhat, whereas ARJ wasn't. A faulty floppy would cause PKZIP or RAR to lose a file or two, a faulty floppy caused ARJ to be unable to use the whole archive.
@CastToVoid 3 жыл бұрын
I feel you really managed to cram a lot of information into a tight format. I really wish there was a word for it...
@sugaryhull9688 3 жыл бұрын
lol
@Meepswonder 3 жыл бұрын
Just Zip it already! :)
@CanonOverseer 3 жыл бұрын
@@Meepswonder nah bro just rar it or 7z it
@davidpowers746 3 жыл бұрын
PKUnzip. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
@rricci 3 жыл бұрын
I was at a Black Angus sometime around 2005 or so. They had a trivia game (I think it was called something like NTN), Anyways, I was there at around 10 P.M. The trivia game was shutting down. As it was shutting down, I noticed that it went into a DOS window (Command Prompt for you kiddies out there). Since I'm a computer nerd, I started watching. I forget whether it was PKZIP or PKUNZIP (I'm thinking it was PKZIP, but I honestly don't remember) came up. Whe I saw the PK??ZIP, I was like "WOW! Long time since I seen that!".
@mondrus72 3 жыл бұрын
That would be during the time of the (ARC) Clone Wars
@jacklewis100 3 жыл бұрын
Norton Utilities... Desqview... Lotus 123, Netscape, Wordperfect...
@Domarius64 3 жыл бұрын
Yes, and it's pronounced phonetically - "p-kun-zip", if you ask me and my old school buddies XD
@davidpowers746 3 жыл бұрын
@@jacklewis100 Wrote several history papers on Wordperfect. It was way better than Word back then. Word suuuucked back then.
@trippymchippy8586 3 жыл бұрын
I thought you were gonna say it started in 197z
@okaro6595 3 жыл бұрын
The Zip format was fundamentally different. ARC had minimal directory/header information. Zip had both local and global directories for redundancy, it stored directory trees and the files could span several floppies. One could see that they had put some thought of the format instead of starting with the compression and then adding the file format as an afterthought. I was a very early registered user of the PKZIP.
@thesteelrodent1796 7 сағат бұрын
one of the cool things about ZIP, is if one disk in a multi-disk set gets corrupted, there's a chance PK's recovery tool can restore the data from the checksums, basically the same way a RAID works. To my knowledge, none of other ZIP archivers has this recovery feature. With ARJ and RAR, if one file/disk in a set goes bad, the entire set is lost.
@lemagreengreen 3 жыл бұрын
ZIP did win... until RAR came along, fueled by warez. Then as the need to split archives lessened due to broadband everyone just started using whatever they wanted since it didn't matter anymore, I'd argue 7z is probably the current winner though.
@50MGG 3 жыл бұрын
@@mattpowell8369 More efficient, better compression algorithms, what more is needed? Those are the main points of file compression xD Oh and resource friendly :)
@alanbourke4069 3 жыл бұрын
@@mattpowell8369 Mainly far better compression and it's free. If you're command line oriented then 7Zip all the way.
@SelecaoOfMidas 3 жыл бұрын
@@alanbourke4069 On top of that, it supports a lot of archive and compression formats. Great way to get into tar/bzip/gzip files on Windows.
@FindecanorNotGmail 3 жыл бұрын
Oh, I remember the point of RAR was that you could split a large archive into multiple parts to save it on multiple _diskettes_
@ChrisDreher 3 жыл бұрын
@@FindecanorNotGmail ZIP and ARJ had that ability loooong before RAR existed.
@IrisGalaxis 3 жыл бұрын
I like the fact that Phil Katz wasn't hypocritical and made ZIP free for all developers to use.
@Alias_Anybody 3 жыл бұрын
Another lesson about the importance of good PR.
@toddfraser3353 3 жыл бұрын
I think it was a case that SEA was being a bit more professional than PK. The BBS community was for the large part a group of hobbiests. Where piracy was really common then it felt safer to run a BBS using software that you didn't feel that some company is going to give you legal action for a Hobie that costs a mid range PC and a telephone line.
@vyor8837 3 жыл бұрын
@@toddfraser3353 Honestly I'd have posted to the BBS groups the exact details of what was going on.
@G3DTrance 3 жыл бұрын
ARJ deserves some recognition in the compress utility history, and so RAR format. It would be great a follow up to this one with other formats in the mix. Great video by the way! Thank you!
@bxdanny 3 жыл бұрын
All these years later, and I did not know until I saw this video that Katz's PKARC code contained those comments and misspellings showing parts had been lifted directly from SEA's code. I thought it was 100% "clean room" code reimplementing the ARC file specifications from scratch. It makes a difference. But Katz's death was still tragic.
@davidinark 3 жыл бұрын
I ran a bbs back in the day when I was in high school, as did several of my friends. Pkzip, arc, and several other tools were the lifeblood of our file transfer sections. Great vid!
@Choralone422 3 жыл бұрын
I've always wanted to know more about the ARJ file compression format that seemed to be fairly popular in the early 90's. It had better compression that PKZIP and handled archives split across multiple floppies very well, much like RAR does today.
@LoPhatKao 3 жыл бұрын
i still use ARJ for some things
@circattle 3 жыл бұрын
I always liked the word “ARJive”, but there’s probably millions of people out there who insist it is pronounced “Aryive”
@Marc42 Жыл бұрын
@@circattle It will always be an Arrr-Jay file for me :))
@skankcor3 3 жыл бұрын
Imagine if Technologic went “Drag and drop it, arc, unarc it”. Daft Punk would be ruined if SEA had prevailed.
@burnsy96 3 жыл бұрын
Idk, it's kind of catchy tbh
@MAGAMAN 3 жыл бұрын
Looks like "feelings over facts" has been a huge part of the technology field far longer than I thought.
@Formedras 3 жыл бұрын
That's just humanity as a whole, honestly.
@mrb692 3 жыл бұрын
5:55, the captions still have your pronunciation guide in there for UW Milwaukee
@zsciaeount 3 жыл бұрын
So many new videos lately, each better than the next. Your channel is several types of awesome!
@UltimatePerfection 3 жыл бұрын
You know the shortest compression joke? PKUNZIP.ZIP
@cst1229 3 жыл бұрын
Reminds me of a Reddit post about screwdriver packaging that you need a screwdriver to open.
@UltimatePerfection 3 жыл бұрын
@@cst1229 Wasn't it scissors in a blister packaging that required scissors to open?
@deltakid0 3 жыл бұрын
When I started with computers in ~1999 I Thought Winzip was made by the same company as Winamp.
@petertr2000 3 жыл бұрын
And that WinDo'hs programme too.
@circattle 3 жыл бұрын
2:39 Actual and correct example of the current year’s most abused phrase “expanded exponentially”
@nicholsliwilson 3 жыл бұрын
@Nostalgia Nerd “cut & shut” refers to welding halves of 2 written off cars together. The phrase you were looking for was a “cut & dry” case.
@Formedras 3 жыл бұрын
Or "open and closed."
@nicholsliwilson 3 жыл бұрын
Formedras yeh, that too
@TheHackysack 3 жыл бұрын
or "open and shut"
@Formedras 3 жыл бұрын
@@TheHackysack Yeah. That's actually what I meant. Thanks for the correction.
@D1nomite1 3 жыл бұрын
love your videos! just noticed that at 5:50 you were talking about university of Wisconsin Milwaukee while showing a picture of University of Wisconsin Madison.
@dlinkster 3 жыл бұрын
I was looking to see if anyone else noticed that. I give him some slack since Peter is from the UK, but with so many clips available of Milwaukee on Google nowadays I do find it somewhat irritating.
@D1nomite1 3 жыл бұрын
@@dlinkster yeah I dont blame him, I'm sure he just searched university wisconsin and madison popped up cause it's the bigger school
@_Piers_ 3 жыл бұрын
@@D1nomite1 I also suspect that ostensibly no one in the UK has heard of Madison, Milwaukee is a lot more famous.
@jfan4reva 3 жыл бұрын
I remember those days. From the sidelines, SEA came off as a large company aggressively suing Phil Katz for making a better ARC program. They even went to the length of suing him for using the term ARC in one of his user manuals after he had stopped making his ARC compatible software. It really pissed off the BBS community which resulted in BBS operators recompressing all of their existing files using PKZip. The idea of making the PKZip format public domain was what put the nail in SEA's coffin though. It guaranteed that the PKZip would be used by a large portion of the software development community, and become the defacto standard from then on. Thanks for the video!
@ssl3546 3 жыл бұрын
What you're saying is all true. This video is propaganda. It omits that PKARC (and then ZIP) were much faster and the deflate algorithm (released in 1991 in beta form and 1993 in PKZIP 2.04g) was better than anything else out there AND patent-free which is why it is still used today. The fact the Phil Katz used immaterial amounts of FREELY AVAILABLE source code in his program is technically copyright infringement, but it sure was a dick move on SEA's part to release it and then turn around and sue a guy who used it. Why the fuck did they release it in the first place then?
@maschyt 2 жыл бұрын
@@ssl3546 The video explicitly mentioned that PKARC was much faster.
@svankensen 3 жыл бұрын
It’s weird seeing you in the videos and finding out you look about my age. I always assumed you were a decade older. Great content as always!
@piercebros 3 жыл бұрын
... what?
@doubtful_seer 3 жыл бұрын
That’s... pretty backhanded
@svankensen 3 жыл бұрын
Nicole Wren How? It’s just that he talks about stuff that happened when I was very young. I got internet in 1996, when I was 11. BBS were on their way out by then for example.
@pigeon2503 3 жыл бұрын
@@svankensen Just to be curious of other people's feelings, you should never comment on somebody's appearance (or in this case, their voice) unless it's positive and in a non-sexual manner. It's considered backhanded because it translates to "you sound a decade older than you are" which isn't flattering. I understand this isn't what you meant to say, but I wanted to answer your question :)
@svankensen 3 жыл бұрын
Charlotte L Ah, that makes sense, yeah. Glad someone questioned it so that I could clarify.
@John_Ridley 2 жыл бұрын
Nice summary of the compression war of the 80s. I was there and running a BBS at the time so I definitely saw all this. I did learn a thing or two. I'm a programmer and I was just thinking recently about how the late Katz's legacy seems set to live forever - the ZIP format is now baked into a TON of stuff at a very low level right up to the latest web technologies.
@heavy0119 Жыл бұрын
I see tar or tar.gz more often in web compression
@lamelama22 3 жыл бұрын
Fun note based on the graphic of all the file formats at the end... if you use Microsoft Office, you use ZIP files even more than you might realize. All of the "modern" file formats, introduced in 2007 (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) are just .zip files with a bunch of textual .xml files in it (the 'x' in the file extension) and possibly other resources (like picture files).
@Power2All 3 жыл бұрын
I prefered ARJ back in the days, as it could compress to multiple disks, which PKZIP did not support yet.
@gregsmith9183 3 жыл бұрын
ARJ certainly was the best back in the BBS days. Along with ZIP. These days its still ZIP due to it being inbuilt into Windows. Along with RAR for handeling mutiple formats. Including ZIP. Which is still my favourite. Just as Macafee antivirus, norton utilities and xtree gold. were the goto software back in the 80's and 90s.
@awilliams1701 3 жыл бұрын
After I discovered that the doom installer was just merging a split self extracting zip executable, I wrote my own utility to split them. Yay! Here you go! all 50 disks for file X. lol Such a pain in the butt. I do not miss those days.
@BrendonGreenNZL 3 жыл бұрын
ARJ multi-disk was actually sane. It could be used to "sneakernet" an arbitrary volume of data from one computer to another with as little as three floppy disks -- one reading the first volume, one transporting the second volume, and one writing the third volume; by which time the first floppy would be ready to receive the fourth volume.
@awilliams1701 3 жыл бұрын
@Dave doom 2 is not compressed. Quake 3 on the other hand is just a zip file renamed to pak.
@gerstelb 3 жыл бұрын
I got my name attached to the credits of a big Census data project because I was the on-site techie for the institute doing the data crunching, and I figured out how to use ARJ to make “installer disks” for the multi-megabyte databases they needed to send out.
@herbiehusker1889 3 жыл бұрын
Pkunzip.exe was an essential program back in the day.
@thatsw0lfy526 3 жыл бұрын
PK Fire PK Thunder "Okay"
@enthusiasticgeek7237 3 жыл бұрын
i still have pkunzip.exe on my ibm 380xd ngl
@herbiehusker1889 3 жыл бұрын
@@patrickglaser1560 who is Sum F?
@herbiehusker1889 3 жыл бұрын
@@patrickglaser1560 well, hopefully I'm nothing like him, because I'm not a troll, just trying to make meaningful comments
@herbiehusker1889 3 жыл бұрын
@@patrickglaser1560 you can't comment or your comments don't show up for anyone else?
@GameplayandTalk 3 жыл бұрын
Great stuff, I'll definitely be checking out the BBS doc. Thanks.
@frostwise87 3 жыл бұрын
Man you've released some brilliant vids recently! Very entertainly educational. Cheers
@Draliseth 3 жыл бұрын
When the filesize is too large, YOUMUSTZIPIT! When the floppy is too small, YOUMUSTZIPIT! ZIP IT. ZIP IT GOOD. (Full parody pending, I may just nap all day)
@Atlas-yh6vg 2 жыл бұрын
still pending?
@cmyk8964 2 жыл бұрын
IT’S NOT TOO LATE
@Draliseth 3 ай бұрын
@@cmyk8964 *_TO ZIPIT! ZIPIT GOOD!_*
@pappires 3 жыл бұрын
Interestingly, during my BBS days, around 1993-4, it seemed to me that almost everyone preferred Robert Jung's ARJ.
@xheralt 3 жыл бұрын
I remember using PKZIP, PKUNZIP, PKSFX, etc. I went to UWM in the 80's, and my "Degrees of Phil Katz" number is _2._ I also remember walking past the PKWARE offices (after he'd passed) in the Grand Avenue Mall, downtown Milwaukee many times.
@AlsGeekLab 3 жыл бұрын
Astonishingly good work again! Keep it up!
@superscatboy 3 жыл бұрын
Nerd: How .zip won Me: *Laughs in .tar.gz*
@john8t8t 3 жыл бұрын
I too was wondering about TAR in the story.
@peace9272 3 жыл бұрын
_tar -zvfx_ goes brrrrrr
@BurnedPinguin8630 3 жыл бұрын
.tar.gz is what we call the impostor of archive formats, only used by nolifer linux fans. The 3 primary formats you will be finding online are .zip, .rar and .7z.
@nemrody7828 3 жыл бұрын
@@Riskteven most likely it started with the casette storage devices. You know, those things that data centers would use as a cheap backup solution
@bananya6020 3 жыл бұрын
@@BurnedPinguin8630 ...like how .7z is the impostor format of 7zip nolifer fans. seriously, who the fuck is "we"? can we get an actual vote in here? :P
@xofcenter5576 3 жыл бұрын
You should cover the saga of PGP next. Funny how the legal environment was a lottery back in the day.
@ZlothZloth 3 жыл бұрын
"This T-shirt is a munition." Oh yeah, those were the days...
@sickregret 3 жыл бұрын
Excellent series of videos lately!
@peter_piper 3 жыл бұрын
Fascinating video! I well remember ARC and of course zip (started in computing in 1984 with an OU degree) but never knew the background until now. Well done !
@MatoNupai 3 жыл бұрын
You should have included other compression tools LHA (sometimes called LHArc And ARJ. Both had better compress than .arc or .zip
@gravis778 3 жыл бұрын
I completely agree, ARJ, RAR, GZIP, TAR, LHA.. Hopefully in a future episode
@ChrisDreher 3 жыл бұрын
I was an ARJ fan in the early to mid 1990s. Part of it was better compression, part of it was that it split files across floppies better, and part of it was that you only loaded each floppy disc once (ZIP required reinserting some of the discs twice). However, I think ARJ turned some people off because they pushed Christianity on its users. It wasn't a heavy push but it did feel odd and out-of-place. This wasn't the main reason ARJ didn't take off but it didn't help either.
@AlexBoneff 3 жыл бұрын
ARJ! Yes. That was the archiver of choice of myself and people around me back then... pkZIP was a joke
@Mnnvint 3 жыл бұрын
@@gravis778 bzip (that is, bzip2) is interesting too, because it's based on a completely different approach to compression, which was discovered more or less by accident.
@catriona_drummond 3 жыл бұрын
They all had their own unique features. arj could make a multi floppy archive, LHA could make a self extracting file with simply an extra command like option. Also LHA could pack subdirectories.
@peterknutsen3070 3 жыл бұрын
I uploaded and downloaded files compressed with LHZ and later LHA. As I recall, working with ZIP files was a nuisance on the Amiga...
@Mnnvint 3 жыл бұрын
I associate LHA with the Amiga too.
@NozomuYume 3 жыл бұрын
@@Mnnvint It's basically associated with the Amiga and with Japan. LHA was written by a Japanese person and was the first archiver to really have proper Japanese documentation and promotion, therefore in Japan LHA continued to be the format of choice well into the Win95 era and was eventually built into Windows Explorer such that you can open them like folders (just like .zip opens in western Windows versions), a feature that remained even in Windows 7 (Japanese edition). This was kind of frustrating for us Amigans though as the Amiga version of LHA forked into a European Amiga version, and only supported compression methods up to lh5, whereas lh7 became standard in Japan. It was always super frustrating when you'd download a Japanese .lha file and you couldn't uncompress it (you could see the files in the header, but if they were lh6 or lh7 it would just say unsupported compression method when you tried to extract them)
@GangstaSpanksta 3 жыл бұрын
Later on the Amiga got LZX which beat LHA, ZIP, ARJ, RAR. The LZX author went on to work for microsoft and the compression algorithm was/is used in their .CAB files.
@ChannelReuploads9451 3 жыл бұрын
LHA was the foundation that was to become LZX. LZX being MUCH faster, and more efficient than LHA, while retaining the LHA support.
@TheXev 3 жыл бұрын
@@NozomuYume In 2003, I was working with some online friends on hacking a Japanese PC fighting game into English. None of us could figure out the proprietary file format that images inside of this game were compressed in. After finally finding someone who really knew how to program and reverse engineer, they quickly realized the image format was simple LHZ with a custom header format. After building a new tool, he was able to get even better compression ratios then the original! I never really knew until reading NozomuYume's comments here that it was a very Japanese style of compression! XD 17 years later and I am still learning more about a fan game translation project I worked on 17 years ago!
@craigcampbell5937 3 жыл бұрын
So knowledgeable and interesting. Even throwing things in that are quite simply over the heads of mere mortals, yours truly included, fantastic!
@markdempsey7286 3 жыл бұрын
Thanks for bringing back the nostalgia. I remember these times will with BBS and ARC. Appreciate reliving my late teen years.......
@TheInternetHelpdeskPlays 3 жыл бұрын
Love it. I did always wonder. I still use .zip, I even owned a legit version of pkzip back in the day
@LaMirah 3 жыл бұрын
The strange thing is that in the early nineties when I got into the IBM PC platform, the ARJ format was king, and ZIP files were few and far in between...
@randyhavard6084 3 жыл бұрын
All your videos have the best sound quality. Good video and content also.
@RogerBarraud 3 жыл бұрын
The "X" is meant to be pronounced as the letter - it's an acronym for "eXtract".
@matthewday7565 3 жыл бұрын
7-Zip / 7z format now carries the torch for open compression
@dvdemon187 3 жыл бұрын
Epic. I just thought about that a couple of years ago and researched myself a little to freshen up my memories on this topic. Thanks!
@EM-do9em 3 жыл бұрын
That was a good short documentary. Well done.
@SaltBayGull 3 жыл бұрын
I like using p7zip, 7zip’s command line version. Mainly because when it’s done, it tells you “Everything is Ok.”
@SFSAtlas 2 жыл бұрын
I mostly use tar cause linux
@Trainguyrom 3 жыл бұрын
5:50 talk about University of Wisconsin Milwaukee but shows stock footage of the state capital in Madison Wisconsin (home to University of Wisconsin Madison) Being from Madison, myself, I'm not at all upset, but I'm sure UW Milwaukee alumni would be offended
@matthewjbauer1990 3 жыл бұрын
I work with a guy who just graduated from college at Madison. He is an assistant (jr) manager/product specialist for the factory/office. I know for a fact he would care. He has Madison swag (mostly badger related stuff including a football helmet) posted all around his cubical. That said, we are technically within driving distance to Milwaukee if you are willing to drive 7 hours+. Oh well. This is a British video so I give it a pass.
@travfrancisco 3 жыл бұрын
Scrolled down for this comment
@chouseification 3 жыл бұрын
I'm glad I wasn't the only one to go huh when that clip popped up. Although it's not nearly as pretty on the outside as the MN capitol, it's a very distinctive building (and really pretty on the inside as long as you don't have a major fear of heights, as it's ledges with falls-to-your-death everywhere above the main floor as anybody who has been there knows) and can't stand in for Milwaukee (eww, why shit on Madison like that?).
@Wolfletech 3 жыл бұрын
I'm wondering if it was assumed Milwaukee is the Capitol of Wisconsin being the largest city. Otherwise I can see UW System which is based in Madison but it's complicated for anyone outside the Midwest to tell. (UW-Stout Grad myself, brother went to UW-Madison)
@TheGuyThatEveryoneIgnores 3 жыл бұрын
@@matthewjbauer1990 Just to clarify, Milwaukeee and Madison are only about 80 miles apart. Maybe you did not mean to imply that you are in Madison.
@roopjm 3 жыл бұрын
The BBS documentary was so great! Took me right back to the mid-90s, for some serious nostalgia.
@utz716 3 жыл бұрын
Just came across your channel love it! I have my OS/2 warp box next to me at my office.
@VladoT 3 жыл бұрын
We have used ARJ format which offered higher compression than ZIP back then at least until RAR came out...which had even better compression ratio 🙂
@DavidWonn 3 жыл бұрын
I still use the DOS version of PKZip 2.50 often on my older offline PCs. Its advantage over the more common 2.04g is that it understands long filenames, but only when run inside Windows 95 / 98.
@JustWasted3HoursHere 3 жыл бұрын
I have great fond memories of downloading games from local BBSes to play on my C64 using my 300 baud modem. Yep, can't tell you how many times me and my friend waited an hour or two to download a game only to find that it didn't work! Moving up to that light-speed 1200 baud modem was like going to heaven... I really miss the whole color-ASCII environment of those BBSes, too. Some were even animated. Good times.
@linux42069 3 жыл бұрын
That documentary was well worth the 5 hours!
@farhanyousaf5616 3 жыл бұрын
I used LHA and ARJ at the time, with better compression. ARJ had multi-disk spanning alongside better compression, so it was my go to choice.
@ChannelReuploads9451 3 жыл бұрын
LHA and LZX also had multiple disk spanning. You could tell it to split the archive at a certain size,
@farhanyousaf5616 3 жыл бұрын
@@ChannelReuploads9451 I used UC2 a lot as well. In fact. I remember it had a cool feature where you could give a special dictionary comprising/representative of your files and it'd use that to compress/decompress at a much better ratio.
@mymemeplex 3 жыл бұрын
Farhan Yousaf heh i was just wondering if anyone else was using uc2 back then! It was slower, but for certain files much better.
@scremingwhisper1720 3 жыл бұрын
It'd be interesting if you look into the history of usenet since that's been around a decade longer than the Internet
@Guztav1337 3 жыл бұрын
Is it still around? I thought all those pre-internet alternative was not used anymore.
@svndwich977 2 жыл бұрын
Whoever made winrar is a homie is all I know. Thanks for not being free but letting me use it for free all this time. I appreciate it
@Fig_Bender 3 жыл бұрын
Your videos bring me back to a more simple time, I miss the earlier days of pc
@xeridea 2 жыл бұрын
Zip was great for the time, I even had it on my calculator back in the day. Too bad there was the drama over Arc. Now, 7Zip is the superior format, offering a lot better compression than Zip, and is open source.
@misaalanshori 3 жыл бұрын
2:52 1985 or 1995? The voiceover and subtitle is different. I know i could just search it up but I'm a very lazy human being
@thegearknob7161 3 жыл бұрын
85
@Kevintherubiconjeep 3 жыл бұрын
Good to see these stories. I remember the early days of the PKware software.
@arcadesunday4592 3 жыл бұрын
Yip. I remember PKZIP and PKARC. Great video! Brought back many memories of BBSs and, er, multiple floppy archives!!
@HenryLoenwind 3 жыл бұрын
I'm not so sure this is completely right. ZIP did not gain dominance during DOS times. Only after Win95 came along and command-line DOS archivers were no longer relevant it became the de-facto standard. It also had a big market share for commercial (non-BBS-related) uses. For the DOS+BBS era e.g. ARJ was in much wider use after it took over from LZH/LHA. Which itself had a smaller share in the fragmented post-ARC pre-ARJ era. However, it's not as if there only was one use case for compression, and naturally different use cases had different formats. For Fido there was the Nodelist distribution, which (as far as I know) want from ARC to ZIP with no experimentation as it was a globally generated file. Then there was message distribution, where stuff got put into archives just for individual automated transfers. For those you more or less had to coordinate with your links on what format to use, but especially in later times most BBS could accept archives in a dozen different formats---the unarchivers used were free so it was just a line in a config file. And then there were files that were offered on BBSs. For those everyone would chose the archiver as they wanted. Some BBSs re-archived files into a format to their liking, others left them as they got them. And even others offered the same file in multiple formats. (I operated a BBS from 93 to 99.)
@chrishutton1458 3 жыл бұрын
Henry, I remember being introduced to SEA arc around 84/85. It was only about a year later that someone pointed me to the PK versions of arc and unarc. They just did everything faster on the same PCXT (8088 @4.77MHz) (thats 0.00477GHz)
@3dlabs99 3 жыл бұрын
ARJ was also quite popular before ZIP took over
@0311Mushroom 3 жыл бұрын
Arj was much later.
@BrienMalone 3 жыл бұрын
LZH was around in 88 and was popular, too. ARJ was mid 90s
@rsnilssen 3 жыл бұрын
Thanks! The story deserves to be told.
@ProduccionesLukaz 3 жыл бұрын
amazing videos! keep em coming!
@songoku9348 3 жыл бұрын
Ah yes, the good old days of downloading SNES roms in zips. Eagerly waiting in excitement when loading them in zsnes.
@ActionGamerAaron 3 жыл бұрын
Saying it like people don't do that to this very day.
@songoku9348 3 жыл бұрын
A Gamer Aaron There was an exciting feeling during that time because you were just discovering Japanese exclusive games the west never got. Because we were kids back then we didn’t have the funds to procure these games the standard way. Nowadays it’s no big deal, either you import a game or just buy it digitally from the Japanese store on your respective console eshop, PSN etc. That feeling of excitement playing non English Roms are long gone.
@poisonouslead85 3 жыл бұрын
@@songoku9348 I think part of it was also bandwidth/data storage restrictions too. It took 20 minutes to download a SNES rom. I can download the entire SNES library in less than that now. And I'm about to buy a separate SSD for downloading the entire PSX library. Now individual roms really aren't special.
@cmyk8964 2 жыл бұрын
Wait, that’s what the Z in ZSNES stands for?
@wojiaobill 3 жыл бұрын
"Software Enhancement Associates." I sea what you did there
@billvoltmer2569 3 жыл бұрын
I think it might have actually been "System Enhancement Associates".
@rondlh20 3 жыл бұрын
Great video again, amazing animations, good job!
@ivuldivul 3 жыл бұрын
Great video! Keeps them coming!
@keiyakins 3 жыл бұрын
"The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee" - shows downtown Madison. Come on man, the isthmus is super recognizable even from the air. Especially with the state capitol building.
@SteveMacSticky Жыл бұрын
yes, that is Madison, Ohio
@efonefifty 3 жыл бұрын
Nerd, your stare during the intro unnerved the ever living hell out of me. Sip on a coffee or a cuppa tea next time, like it's an 1980's interview show...
@fk3239 3 жыл бұрын
What a non thing
@zooblesdoobles7298 3 жыл бұрын
loving the updated look f your channel!
@gstcomputing65 3 жыл бұрын
Awesome work, as always. I would like you to do an episode on Gary Kildall and the tragedy of CP/M sometime.
@bobisnotaperson 3 жыл бұрын
Pkunzip and Pkzip sound like Mother Series moves
@pronstorestiffi 3 жыл бұрын
I was using ARJ for a very long time, before i went to zip.
@MrStephen182 3 жыл бұрын
Awesome video. You say have a great evening but I watched this at 4 in the morning.
@geoffstrickler 2 жыл бұрын
Good coverage. I remember all of this. I had nearly forgotten about the ARC drama and even the format, but this refreshed my memory. PKARC and PKZIP simply trounced SEA’s software, legal issues aside. Phil Katz (Raymond Lau on the Mac side, via his StuffIt software) drove compression software to the state we k ow today. There was some similar work going on in the *nix world, but that wasn’t in the public view much.
@midimusicforever 2 жыл бұрын
Thing is, compression is such an integral part to the internet as we know it, and yet, it was small businesses like these that brought it to us.
@TheHoagie13 3 жыл бұрын
6:10 Peter: As a Minnesota Resident, I can't help but notice you/editor *misspelled Swissconsin's Milwaukee as "MILWAUKE"...* Sorry for coming off as a grammar N@zi...
@TheHoagie13 3 жыл бұрын
All the love in the world ain't enough
@NoStereo 3 жыл бұрын
It isn't misspelled, it just fades out a little quickly. Here's a snapshot I made as it started fading out. i.imgur.com/1j0tBSI.png
@yamigekusu 3 жыл бұрын
Holy hell dude, this was a great listen while vacuuming the floor at my work! This is quite an amazing educational vid
@jonjohnson2844 3 жыл бұрын
It’s amazing how I hadn’t given the absence of PK Zip a single thought until this video, seemed to be the major compression type when I first got into PCs
@antonnym214 3 жыл бұрын
I had no idea that's what happened to Phil. It's a sad thing. I would have liked him to know how great I thought PKLITE was. It was a win-win. It would compress your executables and they not only took up less space, but they loaded faster, in spite of the fact they had to decompress during the load. RIP Phil Katz.
@danielvalle3789 3 жыл бұрын
Is it just me or does every single one of those clips from the documentary look as if it was filmed on a “Roseanne“ set from some parallel universe?
@qbrt4050 3 жыл бұрын
The origins of what we use today, well executed and informative. Love it
@coolvideos8864 3 жыл бұрын
Why dont you have 1M subs yet? The quality of your videos is amazing.
@goddamnfuturama 3 жыл бұрын
I always used .arj. It was always a nuisance when I came across a zip file.