#Pkzip pkware archive
Unlike SEA, which combined archive creation and archive file extraction in a single program, Katz divided these functions among two separate utilities, reducing the amount of memory needed to run them. These files worked with the archive file format used by ARC, but were faster than ARC. Later, Phil Katz developed his own shareware utilities, PKARC and PKXARC, to create archive files and extract their contents. The archive files produced by ARC had file names ending in ".ARC" and were sometimes called "arc files" as a result. These utilities were designed to gather a number of separate files into a single archive file for easier copying and distribution.ĭuring the 1980s, the company System Enhancement Associates (SEA) developed a shareware utility called ARC, based on earlier programs such as tar, that not only grouped files into a single archive file but also compressed them to save disk space, a feature of great importance on early personal computers, where space was very limited and modem transmission speeds were very slow. They include the Unix utilities ar, shar, and tar. Previous programs almost certainly existed.īy the 1970s file archiving programs were distributed as standard utilities with operating systems. PKZIP is an acronym for Phil Katz's ZIP program.įile compression routines date back to at least the 1960s: IBM had a compression program called SQUOZE that was commonly used to pack programs on the 7 mainframes as part of the SHARE operating system. PKZIP is an archiving tool originally written by Phil Katz and marketed by his company PKWARE, Inc.