History of the Zip

The zip file format is one of those vital pieces of computer technology that often gets overlooked. In the early days of home computing disk space was limited and internet speeds were generally slow, therefore file compression was very important. A smaller file took up less disk space and less time to download.

As this interesting page on the history and technical details of the zip file format shows in the early days of home internet use Arc was the first popular compression software but in 1989 the zip format was created by Phil Katz and very quickly became the most popular method of data compression used by millions of users on many millions of files. It is still used to this day usually embedded into other software to save file sizes and also to tidy up collections of files into a single zip.