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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

> You couldn't do a "find XXX | grep YYY | zip" pipeline;

The format was developed in 1989, at which time find(1) and grep(1) and command lines pipes had been around for at least 10 years (more, depending on how you measure it).

It wasn't that you couldn't run pipelines like this, but more that zip's creators didn't care about Unix.

> Software was hand-coded in assembly

I'm not sure what version of software history you've been reading, but I can assure you that I personally was not hand-coding assembly in 1989, even though I was writing device drivers, PostScript RIPs and other stuff at that time.

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> The format was developed in 1989, at which time find(1) and grep(1) and command lines pipes had been around for at least 10 years (more, depending on how you measure it).

PKZIP, which originated the Zip format, was developed on MS-DOS, which did not have find(1) and grep(1), nor did it have pipes (IIRC):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKZIP

It was a third-party who created utilities that ran under Unix-y systems:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Info-ZIP

Unix had its own file archive formats at the time, but it seems that folks on the PC side of things either didn't know about them, or didn't care for them:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar_(Unix)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpio

GP said "computing was different back then", not "Zip was developed on a toy operating system that lacked these sorts of facilities".

I did note that likely what mattered the most was that pkzip's creators didn't care about (or maybe even know about) Unix.

> PKZIP, which originated the Zip format, was developed on MS-DOS, which did not have find(1) and grep(1), nor did it have pipes (IIRC):

COMMAND.COM supported find(1) in the form of DIR /S and grep(1) in the form of FIND. It also supported Unix-like pipe syntax, though because DOS wasn't multitasking it was implemented under the hood by redirecting to a temporary file and running the programs sequentially.

I can assure you this was exactly the case. The original was done in C and then compiled. Phil then would optimize it by hand resulting in highly optimized asm code. All the DOS versions were done this way. That was the genius of Phil Katz. The first VAX version was done in C and that code was then ported to the first unix variants at which time it was moved to 32 bit and the extended attributes fields were added.

>> I personally was not hand-coding assembly in 1989

None at all? 80's C compilers were garbage. Most example code for device drivers (sound cards, video cards, etc) was in ASM back then.

Maybe 80s compilers for MS-DOS/Windows were garbage. Maybe even the ones for Unix were garbage too, and we just didn't care. I've only ever worked on Unix-based systems in my 35 year careers in software, and given that the entire operating system (bar a few low level details) was written in C from the beginning, it has always been rare to fall back to asm for anything unless it was essentially impossible to do the job in C.

I've written on the order of a half dozen device drivers in my life for sound cards, motor controllers, DSP boards and sensors, and have never used asm for any of it.

The discussion is about PkZIP which ran on DOS PC's, so your experience in the UNIX world is going to be very different. Life was different in 16-bit, PC XT/AT land with 640k.

Sure. But this started with a comment that said "computing was different back then". Not the same thing at all.

Also, note that in 1989, Xenix and others ran quite happily on the sort of hardware you're citing, so MS-DOS is/was the actual "limiting factor".

The people that were using UNIX workstations back then, even Xenix, compared to MS-DOS was probably 1 to 1000.

Sure. But MS-DOS didn't define "computing" in 1989. I think it's fine to say something like "pkzip was developed on a platform with a lot of limitations, and you can see some of them in both the program and file format designs". It's quite different to claim that the design of pkzip somehow reflected the general state of computing in 1989 - it just isn't true.

I'd argue that it did, again for 1 out of 1000 people.

Remember that the 'rest of the computing world' didn't really catch up to the early UNIX workstations until Windows 2000/XP.

I did some then (video device driver), and much more of it 10 years earlier.

> I personally was not hand-coding assembly in 1989

I was. You missed out on some fun.

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