[LBo] Re: warning when unzipping files

[Yoder, Denton]

Please forgive me, but this took me on a trip down memory lane.  People
often think of the winzip folks as the big zip cahunta.  I remember when ARC
was the real big deal, and PKWARE created PKARC to utilize the format.  ARC
makers filed suit, claiming the ARC extension was copyrighted.  So, PKWARE
changed it to PKZIP and started the ZIP extension.  I still have PKZip 2.04g
and probably too many of the older ones.  They also "published" the code.
Winzip began as a basic graphical interface for the publicly available pk
source.

Maybe that is why I never had anything for Winzip, but still respect pkware.

Denton Yoder
denton at vt.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: qna-bounces at linuxbasics.org [mailto:qna-bounces at linuxbasics.org] On
Behalf Of Billy Pollifrone
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 11:32 AM
To: qna at linuxbasics.org
Subject: Re: [LBo] Re: warning when unzipping files


This all dates to a time that Windows didn't come with any support for
zip files at all and you couldn't send one to a user that didn't know
what the heck it was. Well, you could, but that's a different point.
Winzip put this small loader in the front that was just enough to run a
small gui and unpack the zip file for them. Now, Windows and many Linux
distros support zip out of the box, so SFX zip files are not needed
except in odd cases.

If you ask me, it was thinking that many companies are happy to do.
Don't educate the user but rather do it for them. Yes, you get more
users and even better, you get more dependent users.