🚀 go-pugleaf

 >   Hmmm... I can recall making the same argument when StuffIt first
 > appeared. "Why use StuffIt, when everything in the Mac world is already
 > archived with PackIt III?" Boy, was I wrong. In roughly a year, StuffIt
 > completely replaced PackIt III as the standard (and with good reason--
 > its compression and feature list were far superior.)


Go take a look at the MSDOS world.  Right now, I can think of about 5 
different compressor/decompressors.  PAK, ZOO, LHARC, ARC & PKZIP.  All of 
which are residing on the hard disk immediately below the screen I'm looking 
at.  Not too long ago PKPAK or ARC were the standards. Once PKZIP came out, 
quite a few people switched to it, because Phil Katz wrote it and, it did 
compress better than PKPAK (PKARC), or ARC.  (I know a system in town which
has 6+gigs of online space, all of which was converted to .ZIP not too long
ago)


Then LHARC came out, boasting increased compression, many switched to it.  Now 
there are "front ends" which determine which archiver was used, and use it to 
unarchive...


There's not really much of a choice for us Macintosh users, we'll have to
wait until there is to see what happens.  But, if the program is commercial,
the chance of it gaining wide BBS acceptance is nil, unless a 
freeware/shareware unarchiving utility is released.  Say Stuffit Deluxe adds
some new compression algorithms, what happens to those who don't have Stuffit
deluxe, as I recall, the unstuffit program was free (please correct me if I'm
wrong here).


David..

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