[fl0under]

I am in my early twenties and I would expect none of my peers during high school would have difficulty zipping up some files.

Perhaps I am just in that brief period of time where more people than just the nerds knew the basics of the filesystem.

[detaro]

few years older, same. But yes, I think that time were nearly everyone was a PC user was only a few years. (and I suspect it depends on country when exactly that was)

[pvaldes]

There are several layers in this problem. To be able to zip files like a pro is great, but maybe those people shouldn't be doing it when they can use bzip2, gzip or xz instead that perform better.

[ghaff]

99% of the time who cares about the performance or the program. If I need to create a compressed archive of a bunch of files for some one off purpose I’ll use whatever is most obvious and easiest on whatever system I’m using.