When the size of hard drives exceeded all possible limits, beyond which the wildest dreamers were afraid to go just ten years ago, it became much easier to store information. However, once everything was different.
The world's first hard drive, developed by IBM, contained only 5 megabytes of data. On such a "screw" it would be impossible to store everything that is now placed on the most ordinary PC. It is difficult to imagine that once without such programs as archivers, it was impossible to imagine comfortable work on a computer.
When compression is relevant
Nowadays, archivers are also used, although not as actively as in the past. However, many people continue to actively compress data. Today these are already large databases, entire huge libraries and something like that.
And earlier, when one book in electronic form took about half a megabyte, and 1, 4 MB fit on a floppy disk, it was necessary to use an archiver to make about 300 out of 500 kilobytes and "stuff" about twice as much information onto a floppy disk. Among the archiving programs, the most famous are:
Winrar is the most famous archiver. In the days of the DOS operating system, it was simply called Rar, it worked from the console, and the Unrar utility was used to unpack it. It will be pleasant for a Russian user to know that the author of the program is also a Russian, Yevgeny Roshal. Back in 1993, he released the first Rar, and then in 1995, WinRar came along. Over the years of use, the program has acquired a lot of supporters, improvements and is actively used to this day in version 5.1;
Zip is also a kind of "grandfather" of modern archivers. It is even four years older than WinRar, since it was first released in 1989, when even DOS was still new. A separate unzip utility was required to unpack compressed files. There was even one very sad joke among users: "PKunzip.zip". Subsequently, with the advent of Windows, more advanced versions of the product appeared, as well as the ability to create self-extracting archives. The project is still alive under version 18.0;
7-Zip, WinAce, IZArc and so on are other archivers that follow the first two programs. Some are still developing, some are known only thanks to the strong memory of users.
Prospects for archivers today
If the hard drive reaches several terabytes, it can store hundreds of movies, and the issue of archiving data seems obsolete. However, archivers still have reasons to live and be well.
For example, if you compress data into an archive, you can put a password on it, and no one else will be able to access important documents. Or large libraries in formats such as *.fb2 or *.txt can take up gigabytes of usable space on your hard drive, but you still won't read them right away. Organizing temporary storage in the archive is a good solution.
So archivers still have reasons to be on users' computers and be actively used.
