If you’ve been messing around with technology for a while, you may remember the good old days of acoustic couplers, ZModem, and Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes).
These were the days before the worldwide web had taken off, when even the slowest broadband speeds would have been sheer fantasy.
And because getting an online connection was slow and sometimes flakey, it wasn’t at all uncommon for techies to compress their programs and downloadable files into tight little packages, to make the download as painless as possible for users. The most famous compression tool of all was PKZip, created by the late Phil Katz, and versions of the .ZIP file format are still widely used today in some circles.
But there were other data compression tools which competed for .ZIP’s crown, each with their own loyal bands of followers. And one of the most famous was .ARJ.
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