Talk:ARC (file format)
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I believe that the current description is completely wrong. "arc" was a verys pecific archiving format similar to zip and various others. It had pretty bad compression ratio so it died as soon as better alternatives showed up, primarily "lharc" (or "lha").
Are there any examples of other archiving programs using the extension "arc"?
Two different things. In the PC world, .ARC was almost exclusively used by SEA's (and PK's) compressors; but on other computer architectures, .ARC were used that had no relation to SEA.
some examples: http://sta.c64.org/stararcdoc.html
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/arc/
There were several others, I could probably dig up more references if requested.
SEA's ARC had excellent compression, for the time it was released. The ongoing legal woes that Phil Katz and other suffered, spurred them to develop better, competing archive formats. The original ZIP algorithms, for that matter, were much less efficient than the algorithms ZIP uses today.
ARC was the first common format in wide use on the PC. ZIP, ZOO, then ARJ, ACE and others all stem from the lineage of products competing with ARC; and most were commercial or shareware in origin.
LZH/LHA was developed independently by computer scientists in Japan; if not for the SEA lawsuit, it might well have eventually spread to the US and pushed out ARC, but its timing seems incidental; LZH/LHA didn't enter into common use in the US/Europe until after PKZIP was established.
--Raduga 01:04, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Didn't later versions of ARC support archiving directories? What exactly was the last version of ARC, 7.0?
BTW, don't forget to mention that: 1). ARC was (supposedly?) free for non-commercial use, and 2). SEA was a very small company that needed others to port ARC to non-DOS platforms, so that's why they released the source. Also, from what I've read, ARC replaced the LBR+SQ combo. I think Thom Henderson runs his own ISP nowadays, right? Armslurp 14:34, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] SEA vs. PKWARE contradiction
The text here seems to contradict (or at least fails to mention important facts [?]) with the PKZIP article. The other article mentions SEA won the legal case and calls the code 'plagiarised', while in this article it is not mentioned SEA won the case, nor is it very clear that what PKWARE did was indeed considered illegal. A correction would be nice, the other article has some good references to sources on the case for exact details. 82.157.229.156 10:15, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Virginia?
The phrase near the end "Henderson moved back to Virginia" seems very odd -- there's no previous mention of him being anywhere else, and in any case, his physical location seem irrelevant to the subject of the article.
Snogglethorpe (talk) 23:14, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
