Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tektronix!reed!omen!caf From: caf@omen.UUCP (Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Phil Katz (PKARC author) sued by SEA (ARC author) Message-ID: <696@omen.UUCP> Date: 20 Jun 88 01:33:39 GMT References: Reply-To: caf@omen.UUCP (Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX) Organization: Omen Technology Inc, Portland Oregon Lines: 39 This suit is an interesting development considering the history of archiving programs and their usage. Early microcomputer archivers included the CP/M LAR program. I don't know if this was inspired by the Unix "tp - manipulate tape archive" programs (now obsolete) or by the CP/M file system. Greenlaw's modified Huffman compression SQ/USQ programs also appeared in the CP/M heyday of "MSDOS prehistory". I've hacked on the code myself, making it portable to Unix. There was even an option to squeeze multiple files into one library, but it was never finialized or documented. Some people started squeezing programs before putting them into libraries, others squeezed the libraries as a whole. Sound familiar? With the advent of MSDOS, both LAR and SQ were ported to the new micros. And then the ARC program took the ideas of the previous LAR usage and automated the member compression function, snarfing the Unix COMPRESS C code in the process. Too bad ARC didn't snarf Unix TAR, CPIO, or AFIO at the same time, we might have avoided the CP/M brain damage that pervades the ARC format today. The only thing that might have been *new* in ARC is the multiple choice of compression methods, and one could argue about that, since it was common practice to selectively squeeze the files placed in LAR archives. There are several generations of the ARC archiver, each producing identically named archive files that older versions of the same program could not decipher. The most recent round in this progression was introduced by Phil Katz's PKARC program. I leave it to the student as an exercise to relate all this to the present topic of contention.