History
In 1985, Thom Henderson of System Enhancement Associates wrote a program called ARC, based on earlier programs such as ar, 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. The archive files produced by ARC had file names ending in ".ARC" and were sometimes called "arc files" as a result.
The source code for ARC was released by SEA in 1986 and subsequently ported to Unix and the Atari ST in 1987 by Howard Chu. This more portable code base was subsequently ported to other platforms including VAX/VMS and IBM System/370 mainframes. Howard's work was also the first to disprove the prevalent belief that Lempel-Ziv encoded files could not be further compressed. Additional compression could be achieved by using Huffman coding on the LZW data, and Howard's version of ARC was the first program to demonstrate this property. This hybrid technique was later used in several other compression schemes by Phil Katz and others.
Later, Phil Katz developed his own shareware utilities, PKARC and PKXARC, to create archive files and extract their contents. These files worked with the archive file format used by ARC, and were significantly faster than ARC on the IBM-PC platform due to selective assembly-language coding. 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. PKARC also allowed the creation of self-extracting archives, which could unpack themselves without requiring an external file extraction utility.
Following the System Enhancement Associates, Inc. vs PKWARE Inc. and Phillip W. Katz lawsuit, SEA withdrew from the shareware market and developed ARC+Plus. This version included a full-screen user interface, with the last known version being 7.12. SEA was eventually sold to a Japanese company in 1992.
The ARC format is no longer common on PC desktops but most antivirus scanners can still uncompress any ARC archives found in order to detect viruses within the compressed files.
Read more about this topic: ARC (file Format)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)