Remembering the Late 80s
Every now and then a small detail from the early PC era resurfaces and pulls me back to those first years of discovery. Today it was the memory of PKARC and later PKZIP, two tools that quietly shaped how I worked with computers in the late 80s. Back then I was just getting into PCs and everything felt new. Storage was tight, modems were slow, and every kilobyte mattered. Watching a file shrink on a monochrome screen felt like witnessing a small miracle.
That moment of nostalgia sent me down a path to revisit the story of compression. I wanted to understand where these tools came from, how they evolved, and why the ZIP format created in 1989 is still part of our daily digital lives.
This is the story I found.
Before ARC: The Two Tool Era
In the early 80s, before ARC and long before ZIP, compression on microcomputers was a two step process. You needed one tool to compress and another to package.
SQ was the compressor. It used Huffman coding to shrink a single file.
LU was the archiver. It bundled multiple files into a single library file with an LBR extension.
It worked, but it was clunky. You compressed each file individually, then packed them together. It was the early equivalent of today’s tar and gzip workflow. Functional, but far from elegant.
1985: ARC Changes the Game
In 1985 System Enhancement Associates introduced ARC, the first tool that combined compression and archiving into a single program. ARC could take a group of files, compress them, and store them in one archive. It simplified everything. It saved time. It saved space. And it quickly became the standard on bulletin board systems.
For the first time, compression felt integrated rather than bolted on.
1986 to 1987: PKARC and the First Big Leap in Speed
This is where my own memories begin. Phil Katz, a young programmer from Milwaukee, studied ARC and realized he could make it faster. Much faster. He rewrote the routines in assembly and released PKARC, a drop in replacement that ran circles around the original.
On the hardware of the time, that speed difference was dramatic. PKARC became the preferred tool for anyone who cared about performance. I remember running it and feeling like I had unlocked a hidden level of efficiency. Files shrank faster. Transfers finished sooner. Everything felt smoother.
But success brought conflict. SEA sued Katz in 1988, claiming code copying and trademark violations. The settlement forced him to stop distributing PKARC.
It could have ended there. Instead it led to one of the most important innovations in personal computing.
1989: PKZIP and the Birth of the ZIP Format
With PKARC off the table, Katz created something entirely new. He designed a fresh format from scratch and released PKZIP in January 1989. It introduced the ZIP file format, built on the DEFLATE algorithm which combined LZ77 and Huffman coding.
ZIP offered better compression, faster performance, and proper directory structures. Katz published the specification openly which encouraged adoption. Within a few years ZIP replaced ARC entirely. It became the universal standard for file compression across DOS, Windows, and eventually every major operating system.
I still remember the feeling of running PKZIP for the first time. Watching files shrink even more efficiently than before felt like stepping into the future.
A Short Timeline of How We Got Here
Early 80s
SQ compresses single files
LU bundles files into LBR archives
1985
ARC combines compression and archiving into one tool
1986 to 1987
PKARC delivers a faster ARC implementation
1988
SEA sues PKWARE and PKARC is discontinued
1989
PKZIP introduces the ZIP format
1990s onward
ZIP becomes universal and new formats like RAR and 7 Zip appear
Why ZIP Still Matters
ZIP is one of the rare file formats from the 1980s that never faded away. It is built into Windows, macOS, Linux, browsers, phones, and cloud services. It is used for backups, downloads, email attachments, and software distribution. It is part of the digital fabric.
Its longevity comes from the principles Phil Katz designed into it from the beginning. ZIP was open. It was fast. It was easy to implement. It was free to adopt. It was built to last.
The tools I used in the late 80s were not just utilities. They were stepping stones toward a standard that still shapes how we store and share information today. And it all started with those early memories of watching PKARC and PKZIP shrink files on a glowing screen.