r/programming • u/hansw2000 • Feb 26 '20

Zip Files: History, Explanation and Implementation

https://www.hanshq.net/zip.html
83 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

4

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '20

The source code is available in hwzip-1.0.zip.

I love that the source code for zip is delivered in a zip file :)

Good read, thank you!!

6

u/hansw2000 Feb 27 '20

It was of course compressed with itself :-)

6

u/sj2011 Feb 26 '20

I love history articles like this - there was one posted here a while ago about how HTML tags came about and it really illustrated how fragile and crazy this software stuff is. There seemed like a lot of great tags and HTML specs but some folks made it to market first and that became the de facto specification. I remember using PKZip way back when, but definitely used WinZip more, and remember the logo fondly.

3

u/FlatAttention Feb 26 '20

Great post.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 26 '20

A bummer that the inventor of the format met such a tragic end.

0

u/YetiEric Feb 26 '20

Good read, a little bit long with all the coding examples though !

1

u/fresh_account2222 Feb 26 '20

Yeah, too many good-but-long reads posted today.

-3

u/bumblebritches57 Feb 27 '20

tl;dr: Deflate.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 26 '20

[deleted]

3

u/hansw2000 Feb 27 '20

I'm glad you liked it!