Recent Info-ZIP News and Ancient Info-ZIP History

• February 2002 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.5. Will wonders never cease?

• September 2001 - It took a month and a half, but Info-ZIP has a pair of new host sites. Hunter Goatley, our own VMS guy and mailing-list admin, is temporarily hosting the web site, http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/. And LEO, the Technical University of Munich's huge Link Everything Online archive, is the new host for Info-ZIP's ftp site, ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/. Big thanks to Hunter, Daniel Lang of LEO, and Kai Uwe Rommel (who helped arrange the LEO hosting)!

• July 2001 - The host for Info-ZIP's home site, FreeSoftware.com, dies a horrible and apparently final death. (FTP access, and hence most third-party mirroring, died in late April.) We're looking for a new host or hosts for www.info-zip.org and ftp.info-zip.org...

• February 2001 - Info-ZIP releases MacZip 1.06. Hilarity ensues.

• January 2001 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.42. Merriment ensues.

• September 2000 - Info-ZIP (specifically, Mike White) releases WiZ 5.02. And there is much rejoicing.

• July 2000 - Info-ZIP (specifically, the "Dirk Haase" subcomponent) releases MacZip 1.05, also under the new license. Source code and binaries are available locally, as well.

• May 2000 - Web (HTTP) access to the new Info-ZIP home site is finally enabled, and the old (very stale) site at www.cdrom.com is turned off at last. The new web site, which should exist from now until the end of eternity, is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/. Files may be retrieved via ftp at ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/.

• April 2000 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.41 and WiZ 5.01 under the new BSD-like license. Also, Phil Katz dies unexpectedly.

• March 2000 - Surprise! The Info-ZIP home site moves from ftp.cdrom.com to ftp.freesoftware.com. (No, we didn't know it was going to happen, either.) In order to prevent this from happening again in the future, ftp.info-zip.org is set up as (currently) an alias for ftp.freesoftware.com, and it will be redirected as necessary to ensure that it always points at the true Info-ZIP home site.

• February 2000 - Info-ZIP releases WiZ 5.0.

• December 1999 - Info-ZIP releases Zip 2.3 under the new BSD-like license.

• November/December 1999 - Al Williams' Windows Commando column Zippity Doo Dah is published in Visual Developer magazine. It's a tutorial on using Info-ZIP's Windows DLLs in a simple Visual C++ application, the source to which is included in the code archive for Volume 10, Number 4, a.k.a. Issue 58. (See the file commando58.zip within the archive.)

• November 1999 - Info-ZIP's former maintainer of Zip, Jean-loup Gailly, is named CTO of MandrakeSoft (a large Linux developer and distributor).

• November 1998 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.4, now maintained by Christian Spieler.

• December 1997 - Info-ZIP releases WiZ 4.01.

• November 1997 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.32, Zip 2.2 and WiZ 4.0.

• May 1997 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.31.

• April 1997 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.3.

• March 1997 - Zip and UnZip are named to the Best OS/2 Software list, and PC Magazine lists UnZip in its 1997 Utility Guide (albeit buried way in the back, third from the end).

• January 1997 - The Info-ZIP home pages and ftp site move to http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/ and ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/ , respectively, courtesy of Walnut Creek CD-ROM. Info-ZIP's new encryption ftp site is ftp://ftp.icce.rug.nl/infozip/ , courtesy of Piet Plomp; it has the same directory structure as the main site but contains only encryption sources and executables.

• May 1996 - The specifications for zlib, the deflate algorithm and gzip are all released as official Internet RFCs (numbers 1950, 1951 and 1952, respectively).

• April 1996 - Info-ZIP finally releases Zip 2.1, now maintained by Onno van der Linden, and UnZip 5.2.

• September 1995 - Kevin G. Barkes again features Info-ZIP in his September column in what used to be DEC Professional, now renamed to Digital Age. (The relevant portion of the column mainly consists of quotes from Greg's e-mail pointing out omissions and inaccuracies in the July column. Oh, the embarrassment.) Thanks, Kevin. [Note: As of April 1997, all traces of DEC Professional seem to be gone from the web.]

• July 1995 - Apparently the pale yellow background previously used on this page got dithered undesirably on some systems (presumably Windows and/or Macintosh, since the X version looked great, but we still don't know). Anyway, the upshot is that it made the text hard to read, so it's been removed while we try to figure out how to avoid the problem. (If your browser doesn't support background colors, don't worry about; it looked nice with the logo but certainly didn't make any difference in the cosmic scheme of things. Unlike Info-ZIP. )

• July 1995 - Info-ZIP's VMS ports receive a favorable mention in the second half of Kevin G. Barkes' column in DEC Professional. (Actually it was more of a mini-review...) [Note: As of April 1997, all traces of DEC Professional seem to be gone from the web.]

• June 1995 - Info-ZIP welcomes Onno van der Linden as the new Zip maintainer. Jean-loup will remain as Chief Compression God, but Onno will take over all portability and features stuff. Look for the 2.1 release before too much longer.

• May 1995 - ZiffNET Threads recommends UnZip and WizUnZip as the preferred freeware unzippers for DOS and Windows. Cool. (Then again, there aren't too many freeware alternatives...)

• March 1995 - George shows up out of nowhere with an early alpha port to VM/CMS, blithely unaware that Info-ZIP had been trying for years to recruit someone to help with such a port. Then he goes and tops himself with a port to MVS as well. Yow, somebody hose the boy down before he ports to another dozen operating systems...

• February 1995 - Chris takes the initiative and sets up the first Info-ZIP web pages, with a little input from Greg. By golly, we're cooking now!

• January 1995 - Mark, Jean-loup and Greg get involved in the development of the PNG graphics format, the officially sanctioned replacement for GIF. This isn't directly related to Info-ZIP (although PNG's free reference compression code came out of Zip and UnZip); it does, however, help explain why new releases of Zip and UnZip have been a little slow lately. As of July the PNG effort is nearing completion - as are other things - so some serious Info-ZIP hacking should resume shortly.

• November 1994 - IBM bundles Info-ZIP code with the OS/2 Warp BonusPak, in the form of the unzip.dll used to unpack various things and restore extended attributes properly. This would never have happened without Kai Uwe's hard work on the OS/2 port.

• August 1994 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.11 and 5.12 (which would have been more appropriately named 5.2 and 5.21, but silliness prevails).

• February 1994 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.1, the first version with ZipInfo integrated into the main UnZip executable. Some executables are made available using a very early version of UnZipSFX (Info-ZIP's portable self-extractor).

• January 1993 - PKWARE releases PKZIP 2.04c (followed quickly by 2.04e and 2.04g), their first official release with deflation. Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.01 with support for a new deflation variant (``superfast'') introduced with PKZIP 2.04c.

• August 1992 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 5.0 and Zip 1.9, both fully supporting the new deflate compression method introduced in PKWARE's PKZIP 1.93a beta release.

• March 1992 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 4.2.

• May 1991 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 4.1.

• December 1990 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 4.0, the core of which was rewritten from scratch by Greg in order to make use of the zipfile central directory. This version also marks the passing of UnZip maintainership from David to Greg.

• August 1990 - Info-ZIP releases UnZip 3.1.

• May 1990 - The Info-ZIP group releases UnZip 3.0, its first public release.

• March 1990 - Keith Petersen sets up the original Info-ZIP mailing list on WSMR-SIMTEL20.Army.Mil, a DEC-20 mainframe at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, around the 22nd of March. David Kirschbaum is the leader of the original group, coordinating patches for the UnZip 2.0b-2.0j betas and beyond.

• December 1989 - Carl Mascott and John Cowan release unzip 2.0a for Unix with various performance tweaks and new -t, -v and -c options. This version became the basis for the original Info-ZIP release.

• September 1989 - Sam Smith releases unzip 2.0 (C sources only?) with new unimplode support (corresponding to PKZIP 1.01). One week later, George Sipe releases a version ported to Unix. (This version became orphaned.)

• March 1989 - Samuel H. Smith releases version 1.0 of his PKUNZIP-compatible unzipper for MS-DOS, with both Pascal and C source code available. Unreducing and unshrinking are both supported.

Imposters

Info-ZIP is aware of eight ``imposter'' zip programs, at least two of which create (or used to create) .zip files:

• Unisys mainframes (formerly Burroughs) have had a ZIP command as part of (what is now) the Unisys Extended Algol language since 1965 or so. This predates all other zips discovered so far, not to mention some Info-ZIP programmers. Although it's limited to Unisys boxes, it does mean that any eventual Info-ZIP port to Unisys will have to rename Zip to avoid name collisions.

• Infocom's Z-code Interpreter Program was first used in July 1979, long before either Info-ZIP or PKWARE existed. ZIP was both the name of the interpreter and the filename extension for machines like the DEC-20 on which ZORK was created, according to Marc Blank, one of the founders of Infocom and primary author of ZORK. More recent, third-party versions of the interpreter all have been renamed to things like JZIP and FROTZ (both of which are reported to be actively maintained as of late 2001), apparently, but they are all derived from an open-source clone by Mark Howell that was also named ZIP. (The freely available data files tend to use other filename extensions these days, too.)

• There was a Commodore 64 utility called Zip that could convert a 160K GCR-formatted floppy into four image files. The Commodore didn't use filename extensions, but these files were sometimes available on PC-based bulletin board systems, and apparently it was common to give them the extension .zip there. The utility was later ported to the Commodore 128, as well. [Thanks to Tom Crescenzi for the information.]

• CMU's Andrew Toolkit (ATK) comes with a (now-obsolete) drawing editor called zip that creates these files (incompatible with .zip archives, of course). CMU's zip also predates (1984) both Info-ZIP and PKWARE, but fortunately it has been replaced by a program called figure that uses the extension .fi.

• Eric Meyer wrote a DOS serial file-transfer utility called ZIP; it probably predates Info-ZIP's program by a couple of years (1988) and may also predate PKZIP. It doesn't create files with a .zip extension, however. It may have been mentioned in PC Magazine at some point, but Greg was probably thinking of the ZCOPY ("zip copy"??) program published in early 1989. [Thanks to Ben Finkelstein and Ian Scott for the details on Meyer's ZIP.]

• Silicon Graphics may bundle an editor called zip with some versions of their operating system. It has apparently been renamed to jot in newer releases. The zip editor was certainly publicly released long after Info-ZIP's archiver and may have been created later, as well.

• Chris Barker on 7 April 1995 posted an article to sci.crypt.research about ZIP, ``a simple, efficient pseudo-random number generator.'' Info-ZIP sent him e-mail pointing out that it's already a pretty busy name space; he said he'd consider changing the name.

• Attachmate has come out with some network software called ZIP! SNA and ZIP! Console (as if we needed any more `zip' software, exclamation point or no...).

• Harry Neelam of Sydney, Australia, appropriated the infozip.com domain name on 12 May 1998. Needless to say, he has nothing to do with Info-ZIP. The web site was empty (aside from mentioning ``Cassandra'') for a long time, but as of late 1999 it finally had some content.

In any case, there's nothing to be done about any of these now; just be aware of the potential name collisions and file incompatibilities, and upgrade to figure if you still have Andrew zip installed.

(And in case it wasn't obvious, Iomega's Zip Drive is completely unrelated. As far as we know, so is the OS/2 ZipStream utility.)

Related Links

• Alchemy Lab's CInfoZip (MFC class for Info-ZIP Windows DLLs, with full source code)

• Chris Eastwood's CGZipLibrary (VB5/6 ActiveX wrapper for Info-ZIP Windows DLLs)

• The Frequently Asked Questions list for comp.compression and comp.compression.research (maintained by Jean-loup).
• Stuart Inglis's Compression Pointers page.
• Mark Nelson's Data Compression Library site (more compression pointers) and Info-ZIP page.
• Dr. Dobb's Journal's Data Compression site.
• Yahoo's Compression Software and Compression Companies pages.
• The gzip home page (a free compression utility by Jean-loup (and Mark), intended to replace the standard Unix compress(1) utility--and doing a darned fine job of it; distributed as part of the GNU project; based on the deflate/inflate code in Zip and UnZip).

• The zlib home page (a free compression library by Jean-loup and Mark, based on the deflate/inflate code in Zip and UnZip). [NOTE: the zlib site moved to a new domain on 2 March 2000 and again on 7 June 2001. Insofar as the latter was to its own domain, it should be the last such move ever. (Of course, we all know how long predictions like that last...)]

• The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) home page. (zlib was created for PNG.)

• The MNG (Multiple-image Network Graphics) home page.

• Greenleaf's ArchiveLib home page (uses zlib for PKZIP 2.x compatibility)

• PKWARE's home page.
• The TkZip home page.

• The following products all use (or are based on) Info-ZIP code for compression and/or decompression:
  • WinZip
  • UnZIP95, Zip Navigator, etc.
  • DynaZIP
  • ZIPExplorer (via the DynaZIP DLLs)
  • ZipIt
  • SAMzip (uses the Zip and UnZip DLLs for Win32)
  • Easy Zip 98 (uses the VB interface to the Zip and UnZip DLLs for Win32)
  • Maquisistem LongFilenames Zip Compress OCX (versions 2.1 and later)
  • LDZIP (archive long filenames under plain DOS)
  • Unzip64 and Unzip128 for Commodore C64/C128
  • UnZip-Ada
  • TclPro
  • Object Desktop for OS/2
  • XDESK for Win32
  • PBEM (Play By E-Mail) for Win32
  • Netanything for Win32