Oh yes, and in a set of 14 disks, it was always the last one which was corrupt.

Oof, I felt that. I recall reading, many years ago, some statistics on how CD-ROM discs filled to about 600-650 megs made them much more reliable than the ones pushed to theoretical maximums. This was about regular, retail data CDs, not (re)writables.

I have always felt the floppy was a great demonstrator of the concept: a 3.5 inch might be perfectly fine for everyday usage and storage, but the moment you're trying to carry some data in 1.44 meg [0] zip portions, you're bound to find out just how many defective discs you had the entire time.

[0]okay, it was 1.37 meg of data actually IIRC but still

RAR was even better for multi-volume archives.

Among me and my peers we used arj.exe

It's been a long time, so maybe I'm misremembering things, but I seem to remember ARJ being the "cool" replacement for ZIP, but then when RAR came along, ARJ quickly died out.

LHA(lzh/lharc) was also a cool replacement at some point, especially since it was just one binary for both compressing and decompressing.

The switch didn't happen until 1995 when WinRAR came along, if memory serves. RAR was 1993 and ARJ was 1991.

Also I remember ARJ and PKZIP being used legitimately while I can't think of a single time I encountered a rar file in a non piracy context. Actually when I got my first job fixing up desktop computer in a large public institution the presence of winrar was a sure sign that I was better off airgaping the computer immediately, scanning with an offline antivirus and backing up noninfected user data and then reinstall, hoping I would not encounter child porn.

Eeeeeh I spent two decades pirating stuff ending with being a co-admin for one of the largest warez sites in Central Europe and I can tell you in all this we were clean. (Note this ended twenty years ago.) There was enough trouble with the law for just stealing software we didn't need the forces hunting for CP on us too.

Especially with par files for those pesky corrupt disks.