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To save you a query:

- "The name "zip" (meaning "move at high speed") was suggested by [Phil] Katz's friend, Robert Mahoney.[4]. They wanted to imply that their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format)#History

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Conversely:

The term ZIP is an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan; it was chosen to suggest that the mail travels more efficiently and quickly (zipping along) when senders use the code in the postal address.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code

And for anyone who hasn’t heard of him, look up “mr zip”! The smithsonian has some great material. I’m hoping to create an online archive (hah) of mr zip materials at https://mr.zip sometime soon

Interesting. In iconography I often see an allusion to a zipper being used as if compressing an overfilled suitcase.

That's funny, I always pictured it as "zipping up" like closing up some sort of container.

Quite a lot of zip application icons used this imagery, so that's not particularly surprising

to quote the famous bash.org:

"What should I give my sister for unzipping?"

"20 bucks?"

"no like, for files and stuff"

Hahaha

It's funny how well that would fit tar.

Huh, I had always assumed the etymology was related to "zipper," as in "all my clothes fit in my bag once I zipped it."

I think the zipper iconography was used by pretty early versions of pkzip, so it was definitely on the mind of the format's creator. Of course the more common implementation WinZip (these days from Corel but I assume it was acquired, not sure of the history) went the C-clamp route, which I think it shared with WinRar.

Like other commentors, I always thought it was an allusion to zipping up some sort of storage or container, like a suitcase - zipping would still be useful even if it didn't compress, as it's a way to send a folder as a single file.

I could've sworn it was named for the authors - took a while to find with nothing more to go on, but I was thinking of Lempel-Ziv (and I suppose Ziv became ZIP, sorry Ziv). I must be using a lossy compression for memory.

Interestingly, gzip came after zip (some 3 years later)

Well, GZIP is GNU ZIP. I ale says expected it was developed after the original ZIP.

gzip is just the compression/decompression algorithm (Deflate) from PKZip.

They needed a new compress/decompress tool once IBM asserted their patent rights on the LZW algorithm used in the compress tool.

gzip adds its own file header with lots of useless information like a field for a file name.

zip uses a different header for the compression stream, commonly known as the zlib format.

They also use different checksums at the end (CRC32 vs Adler32).

That's what the name might mean but it's simply wrong. gzip is not the same format as ZIP, and the tool itself is unable to read or write ZIP files.

It is however GNU's alternative to the zip format.

A gigazip is 1000 zips

1024

That would be a g̶i̶b̶i̶ kibizip.

No, it's a kilozip, like kilometer (= 1024 meters). A gigazip (not gibizip) would be 1'073'741'824 zips (1024^3 = 2^30).

Also it should be Gzip, not gzip, although it's not ambiguous since the reciprocal prefix is nano-, and in general there are no 2^-X0 prefixes that start with g- like there is for Mega-/milli-.

kibimeter = 1024 meters

kilometer = 1000 meters

https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

I remember fruitlessly trying to open a .zip file with gunzip back in the mid 90s. That was my first experience of the GNU project.

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