The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

Re:The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2... by duskwuff on Saturday December 10, 2016 @09:47PM (#13149315)

- It had a table of contents. You can list the contents of a ZIP file, or even extract individual files, without having to decompress the whole thing. (Which was a particularly big deal back in the 90s, when extracting a large archive would take a while.)

- You could update an archive in place. Not incredibly useful, but certainly nifty.

- It had support for multi-disk archives. Again, big deal in the 90s.

Finally, last but not least: it existed in the PC world. Ports of software between UNIX and PC systems were rare back then, and were made more difficult by the fact that the software would have to run in a segmented (16-bit) x86 environment.

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Re:The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2... by dguaraglia on Saturday December 10, 2016 @11:03PM (#13149532)

This is the perfect answer. The fact that you could split zip files across several diskettes was huge.

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Re:The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2... by DonHopkins on Sunday December 11, 2016 @07:30AM (#13150797)

And AT&T could go after you for stealing their Unix utility source code, who at the time had a huge legal department with a hell of a lot of lawyers.

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Re:The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2... by JdeBP on Sunday December 11, 2016 @09:33AM (#13151208)

Actually, that's second last. Last, but not least is that .tar.Z did not fit the 8.3 uppercase-only filename structure; nor did the Unix semantics that .Z was one sort of compression and .z another.

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Re:The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2... by bluedino on Sunday December 11, 2016 @03:18PM (#13152950)

And even if you had a UNIX tar.z file, chances are the data would be in big endian, have UNIX line endings, and you'd have to do all kinds of wizardry to use the file on a PC running DOS/Windows

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Re:The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2... by ino on Sunday December 11, 2016 @04:32AM (#13150327)

Let me add ZIP2EXE for self-extracting archives.

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