Editing PKZIP (section)

==History==
[[File:PKZIP floppy.jpg|thumb|PKZIP on a [[floppy disk]]]]
By the 1970s, file archiving programs were distributed as standard utilities with operating systems.  They include the [[Unix utilities]] ar, shar, and [[tar (computing)|tar]].  These utilities were designed to gather a number of separate files into a single archive file for easier copying and distribution.  These archives could optionally be passed through a stream compressor utility, such as [[compress (software)|compress]] and others.

Other archivers also appeared during the 1980s, including [[ARC (file format)|ARC]] by System Enhancement Associates, Inc. (SEA), Rahul Dhesi's [[Zoo (file format)|ZOO]], Dean W. Cooper's DWC, [[LHA (file format)|LHarc]] by Haruhiko Okomura and Haruyasu Yoshizaki and [[ARJ]] which stands for "Archived by Robert Jung".

The development of PKZIP was first announced in the file SOFTDEV.DOC from within the PKPAK 3.61 package, stating it would develop a new and yet unnamed compression program. The announcement had been made following the  lawsuit between SEA and PKWARE, Inc. Although SEA won the suit, it lost the compression war, as the user base migrated to PKZIP as the compressor of choice. Led by some [[Bulletin board system|BBS]] [[sysop]]s who refused to accept or offer files compressed as .ARC files, users began recompressing any old archives that were currently stored in .ARC format into .ZIP files.

The first version was released in 1989, as a [[DOS]] command-line tool, distributed under [[shareware]] model with a US$25 registration fee (US$47 with manual).