Another major contributor is likely that with rar you can make a multi-file self-extractor. Seem to recall that before broadband and torrents, many a pirated game was released as a split rar .exe that could fit on floppies and was spread across numerous upload sites.

Dump them all in a dir, run the exe, and game on...

7z can't do the exe bit I don't think, but it can make split archives of arbitrary size (in bytes).

Providing executable packages is a terrible practice anyway and should be discouraged. It reinforces the view that it's OK to execute random untrusted programs just to get a document, the most popular assumption abused by malware developers.

I can't deny that that's true.

It's inconvenient too, as nothing in this house runs Windows right now, and extracting custom fancy EXEs* can get annoying.

(*: Most archivers can reopen the EXEs they create as par the course, and there are lots of extractors and unpackers out there, but I vaguely remember a few incidents where I wanted to extract an executable archive/installer of some kind and couldn't. In some cases pushing the EXE through Wine worked.)

I believe winzip had the same feature of creating a exe zip spanning over multiple files, for using on floppies.

I only remember using that feature when zipping something up myself and it would have you keep inserting floppies as needed. I'm sure you could then post images of the floppies for distribution but I never really saw that done. It was always .r00, .r01, etc on usenet.

True, though i think the making scheme of rar was more helpful. Also, rar compressed various file formats (video and audio specifically) better.

Just what I was going to ask about. I thought WinRAR had the option to include parity checks / redundancy within the data.

BTW, is there a current... "turnkey" (simple, "clicky"), I guess, *NIX solution for doing that within an archive?

There is this par2cmdline[1] tool which is (as the name suggests) a console program "for creating and using PAR2[2] files to detect damage in data files and repair them if necessary". GPar2[3] (alpha) is a simple GTK+ GUI for it.

[1] - https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

[3] - https://github.com/Parchive/gpar2

If you want to build something like that, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/ras-1.03.tar.gz can provide the redundancy support.