retroarchive.org (Announcement 2)

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Wed Jun 20 07:21:26 2001

> I know that the Amiga and Atari ST's had their versions, but
> there was a fairly major format change at some point that could cause
> a problem for older versions of the software on non-PC clones. If I
> recall correctly, PKZIP/UNZIP was actually an outgrowth of PKware's
> earlier PKARC/PKXARC programs and it changed names when Sea
> Associates complained about the closeness of the name to their
> products (ARC & UNARC), whcih they were compatible with. This was in
> late '87 or early '88 and BBS's started boycotting the use of
> ARC/UNARC and switched to ZIP as the defacto compression standard.

They didn't just change the name, they changed the format as well.

I'd been a big ARC user, having switched from SQ/USQ/LU/LDIR etc.
PKARC and PKXARC were so much faster, I switched immediately.

You know the rest of the story.

I kept DOS (for sure, and maybe CP/M) executables of them
so if anyone needs them, let me know. However, they don't
appear to run properly under CMD.EXE (maybe CONFIG.NT needs
a tweak).

Regards,
-doug q
Received on Wed Jun 20 2001 - 07:21:26 BST