The Troubled Origins of .ZIP | Nostalgia Nerd
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2020
- The 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
🔗Video Links🔗
BBS: The Documentary - www.bbsdocumentary.com/
ESVANet: www.esva.net/
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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...
Chicago Tribune Story: www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...
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BBS: The Documentary is essential viewing, if you haven't already seen it. Check out
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?
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.
you've been killing it lately with these videos.. great stuff
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.
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!
The story of PKware stealing SCAs stuff and the fact that the community rallied behind the PKware makes me beyond angry.
Got an ad for Zipcars before the video played. The UA-cam algorithm is either getting lazy as hell or is really playing it on the nose at this point
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...
7zip > Winzip
SEA was solid on the Macintosh in the 90's. Then suddently this thing zip showed up when I was forced to buy a pc in the late 90's. I saw the BBS doc when it came out. It's hard not to think: Shame on those who hated on SEA for taking a stand against Katz.
Winzip, it really whips the Llamas ass.
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).
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.:
15:58
I feel you really managed to cram a lot of information into a tight format. I really wish there was a word for it...
PKUnzip. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
if you open a .zip file as a text file, it has the letters "PK" at the start and the end.
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 thought you were gonna say it started in 197z