Archiving or compression software have been with us for a long, long time now. They enable us to pack and compress data to reduce file size and save hard disk space. Of course, hard disk space is cheap these days but with the advent of the Internet, archiving software has become even more important to the user. Although people now can download files from servers all around the world, the available bandwidth isn't unlimited. So, downloading uncompressed files can take forever and bog down the server unnecessarily.

If those files are compressed, people will take less time to download them, hence saving time and money. Also, the server will be able to serve more people in less time and with less bandwidth. A win-win situation in other words.

More mundane uses of archiving and compression software include archiving of data for backup or distribution purposes via removable media. Without such archiving software, backing up your precious data may cost you a bomb in removable media (i.e. floppy disks, tape drives, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, etc...). Distribution of data on removable media can also be a real hassle without such archiving software by requiring you to manually allocate the files to each (floppy or compact) disk or to carry more of them with you.

Finally, let's not forget Granny... She would like to see more of her grandchildren but with a 5MB limit on her mailbox, you may not be able to send her the entire album without flooding it. And let's not forget that many free e-mail services have a limitation on the size of files that you can attach to each e-mail. Without compression, you will only be able to slip Granny a few photos at a time. So, compression is a necessary fact of computing life. Knowing this, enterprising programmers have developed several archiving software.

Since the DOS days, we have had ARJ, ZIP, LHA, RAR and a host of other compression software. Most were command prompt operated and thus were not user friendly. As far as I am aware of, RAR was the only one with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) back then. But when Win95 was released, those archivers were soon ported over to the Win32 platform. Eventually, they evolved into the sleek archiving utilites you see today.

Of course, the GUI interface isn't the only thing that has been updated in most of those archivers. Remember that although Net access is much faster now than it was before, file sizes are bigger too. As their Net connection becomes faster, people naturally switch to better quality files which are, of course, more bandwidth intensive. For example, while a 112kbps MP3 file was quite acceptable a year or so back, users will now settle for nothing less than a 160kbps MP3.

As file sizes increase, better compression solutions are needed to further improve compression. Better compression algorithms are also needed to tackle the new file formats that have sprout up over time. Without continuous optimizations to address both the change in file sizes and the formation of new file formats, an archiving software would quickly fall behind in performance, usability and soon enough, popularity.

Currently, the most popular archiving software is, of course, WinZip which has proven to be very fast and and yet remained powerful enough for most compression jobs. However, WinZip has been, of late, a little long in the tooth. The last time WinZip was updated was in August '98. That's like... wow!!!... an eternity... :)