It\u2019s 1999, and my friends and I are surfing warez sites using Internet Explorer on our 98SE gaming rig. Finally we push past the scams and porn to find an FTP server with a list of files labeled \u201c.rar, .r00, .r01, r.02\u2026\u201d But what the hell are these?<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, it\u2019s segmented. You have to download this program to expand those. It\u2019s called WinRAR. Way better than WinZip.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo we have to pay for it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo\u2026but if you\u2019re as cheap as I think you are, it\u2019ll keep bugging you to for a quarter century until, in the grim darkness of 2023, Windows 11 finally supports the format natively.\u201d<\/p>\n

In retrospect, my friend\u2019s comment was amazingly prescient. How could he know how grim and how dark the future would be? How could he predict that Windows would switch back to sequential numbering, but skip 9? And how did he know that I am so, shall we say, thrifty that rather than paying $30, I would wait for more than two decades just trying to get my task done in WinRAR fast enough that the \u201cPlease purchase WinRAR license\u201d pop-up didn\u2019t have a chance to appear?<\/p>\n

Yes, it has taken the better part of three decades for the .rar file to finally be supported in Windows without any kind of additional software. Back in the \u201990s, it was just one of several competing compression apps (or \u201capplications\u201d as they were called back then) used to shrink collections of files so they could be more efficiently transferred over our woefully slow internet.<\/p>\n

How long did it take for us to download the Star Trek set of screensavers for After Dark from the dial-up BBS, using the telnet app WhiteKnight, you ask? Overnight. It was, after all, a shade over 5 MB. But had it not been a .sea (self-extracting archive) courtesy of Stuffit, we would have been waiting well into the next day.<\/p>\n

Yes, compression was a must back then, in my case as a young software pirate but of course in more legitimate ways like software distribution and actual \u201carchival\u201d purposes. I can\u2019t speak to whether WinRAR was as common among enterprises as it was among procurers of illicitly duplicated games and applications. But the fact that it has lived a full 30 years since its original development as a DOS program (28 since it arrived on Windows) \u2014 up until its most recent release last week, and still nearly small enough to fit on a 3.5\u2033 hard floppy \u2014 suggests it found its niche.<\/p>\n