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Comment by TimMeade | Hacker News Reader

I think what is being forgotten here is the time the zip file format was created. It was more than 32 years ago as Phil started with arc. Also; there was no internet, no windows, no linux even. It was designed for BBS file transfer. Even in the late 80's and early 90's when it was expanded to the current format for new compression and multi-platform, some machines were big endian and others little endian and that is taken into account. Means had to be added to deal with "extended attributes".

When Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler started infozip a lot of discussion was done to try to guess what the future would hold, but it was just that. Guessing.

The fact we are still using it all is a major miracle.

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The author makes good points about the poor documentation and vagueness of details of the current Zip format. That is something worth criticizing.

But I think criticizing the 30-year-old 'design' is pointless. So this is a good article with a bad title.

What is much more helpful is suggesting, in detail, how Zip might be extended to remain backwards compatible while moving forward to adopt a more sensible future format. (Though 30 years later, some guy is going to write an article saying how terrible that new design is).

ZIP is a product of the microcomputer era, which was filled with hobbyists, many new programmers learning the craft without the benefit of experience with mature systems and the preceding decades of CS work, and even experienced programmers who needed to take shortcuts to do a lot with a little. It was an amazing time where many unpolished programs were developed to try out all sorts of ideas, and there's a lot I find fascinating about the era. (For example, flipping through old computer magazines, it's always interesting how few advertiser addresses were in Silicon Valley.) But as a professional developer in 2021, looking back on that time and genre of computing is also a bit horrifying. ;)

While I agree with your overall point regarding the importance of contextual history when looking at any design, one nit I would pick is your statement that there was no internet when Phil Katz created and PKWARE released PKZIP. First release was Feb of 1989, and I was most assuredly on the internet at that time, and in fact that is where I first encountered PKZIP.

The 80s BBS scene was built around things like ARC, LHarc, and ZOO. ARC essentially got killed by its creators SEA thanks to their suing PKWARE over PKARC. Many BBS operators banned the use of ARC after that lawsuit in protest (a similar furor would erupt 5-6 years later over GIF).

My thoughts exactly. Easy to sit atop an ivory tower to look down upon deflate 32 years later. No denying it’s usefulness though.

Small nit. There was internet--but very few people had access to it. (And I'm guessing, don't remember, that ZIP wasn't used much or at all on internet FTP sites and that Unix-centric formats were used instead.)

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