I was about to reply a little snarkily that I was doing this with zip archives on floppy disks back in the 90s. I thought I might as well check my facts before posting, and it looks like that was a part of WinZip that was not part of the standard.

In 2015 ISO published a standard pertaining to zip archives, and one of the specifications was (from Wikipedia):

  Archives may not span multiple volumes or be segmented.

There are also multiple forum posts when you search for multipart zip archives of Linux users asking how to decompress them, suggesting that this is only WinZip behaviour and not common to the zip standard.

I remember people using arj exactly because of that feature. Compression with arj was worse than zip but people used it because you could divide an arj archive in floppies. At the time, rar could do it too, but it only got popular later.

I had the same reaction, but checked a different set of facts than you did. PKZIP 2.04g (which at the time was the standard) supported split archives, in January 1993. WinZip added support in version 8.1, in 2001.

Edit: I just found the page where you got your quote. Looks like ISO was deliberately defining a subset of ZIP.

Caught up? tar has had this for a few billion years at least:

  $ tar cazf - file1 file2 | split -b 700m - out.tgz

7zip also natively supports splitting for as long as I can remember.

You didn't address this:

> or copy it to multiple flash drives or CDs

How would you use 'split' without either dumping the whole archive on disk or pluggin all drives at the same time?

tar was designed for tape, so you can specify a volume size for the output and it will break it's output into segments of that size. Using split isn't required.

The options in gnu tar are -L and -M for specifying tape length (in KB) and creating multi-volume archives.

The -L version is handy as it can prompt you to change the "tape". It has built-in tape handling as well, if you are using a real tape that can be controlled via mt.

Apparently (just checked info) it supports an arbitrary command to execute at the end of each archive. That would be handy for burning CDs, though I don't remember that feature from when I used floppies or QIC-40 to move files from one machine to another.

Around 1991-ish I would use these options to put archives onto stacks of floppy disks. The floppies didn't have a filesystem, just blocks of tar archive. In the days of 9600 bps modems, this was often the fastest way to move stuff to another machine. I had an often-reused stack of 3.5in HD floppies labeled with numbers for this purpose.

ARJ had that feature and it predates RAR by a few years.

Isn't that just the same as splitting any file into multiple chunks? Why does the archive format have to know about it? For non-solid compression? Otherwise, any file can be split up and re-combined at the other end, unless you don't have the hard drive space to recombine it.

The only way I've seen RAR used in torrents is to package everything into one big file, and since they're usually video or audio that already has lossy compression, and since I may want to prioritize or skip certain files, it's both pointless and annoying.

I don't know, but I think such feature would be way less valuable today.

There are niche uses, mostly with some forms of file sharing with limited file size. For example email attachments, but not only this.

true but its still used heavily on eg usenet binaries, and nzb tools run the 100s of unrar for you not unlike the gui

7zip for sure has. It actually supports it for more than just 7z format.

Multiple floppies! Floppies... "flash drives"... pfft.