The 90s … I remember it like it was yesterday. Gosh, I can’t believe how much of a newbie I was back then. But things have changed … like compression utilities. In the 90s, compression was the rage. We had small hard drive capacities, tiny portable storage mediums (floppy disks), and unimpressive dial-up Internet speeds. It is no wonder that compression was popular. We had to stick as much information in what little we had. The two reigning compression formats back then (and today) was gzip (*nix operating systems) and zip (Microsoft Windows operating systems). The problem was that Windows users only had one way to manipulate ZIP files, WinZIP.

You know you used computers in the 90s if you can recognize this ubiquitous screen.

Basically, nobody read this very annoying screen. Little did they know that they were technically using the software illegally. It wasn’t until Windows ME and “beyond” that this screen slowly disappeared from “computer pop culture.” Thank you God!

Insufficiencies

But, I soon found that this godsend from Microsoft was insufficient. In my geeky computer walk, I found that there were more archival formats than just ZIP. Occasionally, even Microsoft Windows users need to retrieve data from 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, or ZOO files. Even WinZIP doesn’t come with that functionality.

I found this great utility on a TechTV episode. It’s called IZArc. Basically it is a clone of WinZIP with support for all of the formats listed above. If you know how to use WinZIP, you will definitely know how to use IZArc.

Small Problem

There is just one problem that I should note though. Support for anything to do with Tarball files (TAR, TGZ, TAR.GZ) is a little limited. Sometimes it can read from them and sometimes it can’t. Often, I find myself having to upload the Tarball to my server, extract the files, and then download the extracted files. It’s a bit of a pain. If anyone can find a free and legal Windows utility that will always, unconditionally, decompress TAR, TGZ, or TAR.GZ files, I would greatly appreciate it if you would tell me. Just leave a comment or click the contact button on the above menu. Thanks!

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