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Comment by daneel_w | Hacker News Reader

I regularly saw ARJ archives on PC BBSes in the mid 90s, next to LHZ which was most popular. At the same time the Amiga world was (and I think still is) dominated by LZX, which supplanted LHA.

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Member ace? I think the entire 90s “scene” switched to it for a entire hot minute then back to split rars

This brings back a lot of memories! Do you remember the multi steps decompression phases? The par2 files for repairing

I think this is still used in binary use groups. At least it was a few years ago.

Par2 is still on use ;)

I do! I am also old enough to remember a few other side characters like ZOO and ARC.

And the less known but overall better AIN.

http://www.compression.ru/arctest/self/ain.htm

There was also ICE.

Or DMS with XCopy

Oh, I loved WinAce back in the days!

And LZX ended up as Microsoft CAB format, since Jonathan Forbes went on to work at Microsoft.

Talking about Amiga, don't forget PowerPacker! That's what I used on Amiga, in addition to LHA.

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PowerPacker

http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=66230

And over in Mac-land you had Stuffit

Which is surprisingly powerful as it does various data analysis and compression testing of files in order to pick the best method, and often coming up with fantastic results. Though I'd be surprised if it has a mentionable user base these days.

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