Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid someone gave me a game compressed with ARJ...

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)

And later came RAR

And now 7z.

RAR was great at the time because it offered "solid" archiving like a tar/gz combo. Zip and ARJ both compressed at the file level rather than the archive level.

> Zip and ARJ both compressed at the file level rather than the archive level.

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?

The latter.

And now, IMHO, it is great because of its Fastest mode - it is really fast and at the same time compresses quite well.

ARJ came after ZIP. Us poor eighties kids had to suffer with ARC.