Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Ah, ARJ... I used that a bunch. Later, the front-end I wrote got some extra code to also support ARJ, but that was it. Never used the other ones back then. In 1991, it was either ZIP or ARJ, at least in my circle.
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ARJ wasn't my preference, but was fairly widely used. The other that got (and still gets) use was RAR, picked because it made the smallest archives.
LHA was problematic for a while because it used the Lev-Zempel-Welch compression algorithm. Terry Welch was working for Sperry when he wrote a paper describing a simplified version of the Lev-Zempel algorithm that was a lot easier to implement in a program, and his contract with Sperry stipulated that what he did on their time belonged to them. Sperry became part of Unisys. The LZW algorithm was used in GIF images, Unisys belatedly woke up are realized they had some rights to it, and started going after places like Compuserve that used GIF images to collect royalties. The PNG format was a direct outgrowth, intended as a graphics format
not encumbered with proprietary code that anyone could use for any purpose. Unisys's rights have long since expired, but the damage was already done.
These days I just use 7-Zip as my standard archiver. It
extracts pretty much any current archive format including RAR, and creates 7z and Zip files. The underlying compression engine has been ported to other thibngs besides Windows, and I can create and extract 7z files on Linux, too.
The one I saw was an earlier iteration, shorter, and (IMHO) funnier. (I need to come up with an example for TECO...
)
Quote:
That one cracked me up 
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Having dealt with it, I was amused by the entry for 370 JCL. Eight statements in the language, but viewed as a black art by almost everyone.
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Dennis