Very nostalgic! My first software was an arj.exe frontend (in French) for Windows 95.<p>I just launched it! <a href="https://i.imgur.com/HfgleBq.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/HfgleBq.png</a><p>Of course, it's because ARJ was the standard for warez back in these days...<p>edit: It was coded in a language called "Visual DialogScript", which amazingly kind of still exists. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_DialogScript" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_DialogScript</a>
Arj was all the rage when it just came out and for some time after that. Early-to-mid-90s or thereabouts.<p>It was a major step up from pkzip, because not only it compressed better, it could also split the archive into multiple files (making it spreadable across multiple floppies!), it could extract otherwise undamaged files from corrupted archives and had a <i>lot</i> of other options.
In a similar fashion than other people here, my first contact with ARJ was via a copy of Doom compressed and split into several floppies.<p>Some years ago I remembered out of the blue ARJ and checked their site (the one this submission is about). It was nice to see they were still around. I am the kind of person that love the "About" sections and I could not resist to check their "Our Philosophy" one: <a href="http://www.arjsoftware.com/phil.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.arjsoftware.com/phil.htm</a>:<p><i>From the beginning, our family decided that God would be the senior partner in our company and that our business practices would strive to reflect the principles that He has so graciously provided to the world in His Word.</i><p>I am not used to people bringing religion into IT related stuff, I was kind of surprised surprised, in a honestly curious way.<p>(Edited to fix some format)
I regularly saw ARJ archives on PC BBSes in the mid 90s, next to LHZ which was most popular. At the same time the Amiga world was (and I think still is) dominated by LZX, which supplanted LHA.
Once in a blue moon I'll feel nostalgic and go see if the web sites for some of my favorite software in the 1990s are still up. ARJ software is one of my regular stops, and so are Semware [1] (I basically lived in QEdit, back in the day) and JP Software [2] (makers of the 4DOS shell).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.semware.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.semware.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://jpsoft.com/" rel="nofollow">https://jpsoft.com/</a>
I worked with ARJ archives well into 2015. At one point I studied the format to see if it was possible to change the filenames in the archive without unpacking/repacking. It was. And I did.<p>To be fair, I had ~230k files I had to "manipulate", so even automating a unpack/repack would have cost too much time and energy.
I remember ARJ and all the rest of the non-zip compression formats. Back then you could almost be a collector and could certainly be a connoisseur. Fascinating times.
In school, back in the early 90s, I was one of the few who'd acquired the eldritch knowledge of making arj compressed files span multiple floppy disks automatically. You see, you needed that if you wanted to copy the pirated games that inevitably got installed on the school's DOS computers. Fun memories.
At one point, mid 90's maybe, I got the code for the freely available unarj utility and studied it. I remember being blown away by following it and understanding how Huffman compression works. I think that was with the help of a Dr. Dobbs article or something, that was certainly before I had any CS education.
It’s fun example of vintage software bootstrapping. Love the homemade logo and the gradient fill header showing stripes so it could “save bandwidth” by fitting into a 256-color gif.