[chebucto]

This:

"In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. "

is contradicted by this:

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

"... settlement of the lawsuit ... under which ... PKWARE paid SEA to obtain a license that allowed the distribution of PKWARE's ARC-compatible programs until January 31, 1989, after which PKWARE would not license, publish or distribute any ARC compatible programs or utilities that process ARC compatible files.

...

After the lawsuit, PKWARE released one last version of his PKARC and PKXARC utilities under the new names "PKPAK" and "PKUNPAK", and from then on concentrated on developing the separate programs PKZIP and PKUNZIP, which were based on new and different file compression techniques."

Wiki also says

"The SEA vs. PKWARE dispute quickly expanded into one of the largest controversies the BBS world ever saw."

Any greybeards care to comment?

[Patrick_Devine]

I remember all three formats.

You have to keep in mind the context of the times; there was no Linux yet, almost no one had heard of the internet, and certainly there were no things like the world wide web or wikipedia. No one really knew about open source or the legal fight between SEA and PKWARE. We all switched to PKZIP because it created the same size archive files as ARC and it uncompressed so much faster.

In 1988 I was 14, and really just wanted to play more shareware games. It really didn't matter what format they came in, but if they were in ZIP format, that was great since it took less time to uncompress on a 4.77 MHz processor (yes, you read that correctly - I boosted it to 8 MHz with an 8088 clone chip by NEC called a V20). A few years later it was all moot anyway, since I discovered Linux and everything was using tar/compress or shar (shell archives).

[specialist]

Wow. The memories. I ran the hub for a CAD/CAM and animation themed BBS network. We would switch to the latest, greatest (e.g. PKPAK) almost immediately to reduce phone bills.

[mcguire]

You aren't kidding. I'm having NEC V20 flashbacks.

[Patrick_Devine]

I remember feeling incredibly bad assed as a young teenager prying the old 8088 chip out and slotting in this new processor which came in the strange plastic tube which I bought at some random hole-in-the-wall PC shop in Vancouver. I think I had just read Neuromancer for the first time at that point. It was a definite Future Shock moment for me.

[derekp7]

This was about the same time period that companies started suing over "look and feel". One prominent example at the time was Lotus suing (I think) Paperback Software, and also Quarterdeck Software (Quatro Pro). So, when it appeared that the same was happening between Sea and PKware, many BBS operators (at least in the Midwest) dumped Arc for Zip almost overnight. What made it worse was that PKarc was significantly faster than Sea's arc, so it looked like "If you can't compete, then sue". Of course, a lot of the details were kept sealed while the court case was going on, and all people had to go by then was what leaked out.

[micro-ram]

I didn't care about the controversy I just remember re-packing all of my files in .zip to save more space on my BBS.

Unfreezing...Melting....OOOO00000oooooo........

[fleitz]

That reminds me of ARJ, I have no memory of why, but I was a much bigger fan of ARJ than zip.

[reidrac]

Me too. ARJ was easier to use IIRC, specially with muli-volume archives (frequent if you had to split an archive into several diskettes).

I used ARJ mostly, until RAR came in, of course ;)

[Sami_Lehtinen]

Did someone forget LHA / LZH?

[rhizome]

I wasn't aware of the controversy at the time, but I do remember there being a fairly rapid transition from .ARC to .ZIP on the BBSes I used around that time.