I remember being so excited when the zip format came out. Prior to zip, we suffered with the arc format. At 2400 baud, the difference in compression was very very significant.
No. You may be thinking of gzip, a spiritual successor and replacement for the Unix compress/uncompress (and even earlier pack/unpack).
But both ZIP and ARJ, and the earlier ARC, all made multiple-file archives.
Or did you mean that the compression was “carried over” from file to file inside the archive?
Internet didn't existed yet in my country, took me 3 years to figure out how to open that file, and in the meantime I infected my computers multiple times with tons of viruses (seemly packing viruses in unzippers was popular... the one with most viruses was "pkunzip" or something like that)