Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer invented the zip feature to Windows Explorer. He sold it as a shareware program when Microsoft contacted him to buy it. The Microsoft person that contacted him was unaware that he worked under Dave Custler's Windows NT dev team. I believe they came to an agreement. Dave also created task manager as a side project.
I'm actually surprised you guys didn't cover "zip bombs" or "Zipper bombs". Where people upload rarfiles that are "what you were hoping to download" only to find that after a few seconds when you uncompress it, your entire pc crashs and whatever disk you unzipped too is now permanently locked because the person who made the zip filled it and compressed it with more data than your HDD or ssd could handle. Now I know this has been fixed depending on your version of windows. But that's just it, it depends on your version of windows. Afaik this still works on everything from OG windows to windows 10.
There are compressed formats like dwarfs that let you mount them as filesystems so you can access all data without the need for decompressing single files out of the compressed one. It runs the decompression at runtime meaning you can run a whole game directly from a .dwarfs file.
@@kuromiLayfewhat? My mac just unzip it for me and delete the zip right after downloading. I thought it would be a good idea mounting it if it's not a big heavily compressed file
@@kuromiLayfe not really, mainly .dmg (disk image) files and most of those are read only, though some allow read/write. zip and other compressed files on mac can't even be viewed in finder until you unzip them
Of note, is that Microsoft Office documents these days are ZIP files, with their embedded elements like graphics etc. being represented by separate files within the ZIP, and XML files tying it all together. This is soooo much nicer than the old way of doing things which involved OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) formats which basically involved serialising objects to disk from memory. It's one of the reasons why Outlook PST and MSG files are only fully supported by Outlook on Windows, and why Microsoft desperately wants to get away from them.
I'm actually really happy with this video. As someone who used WinRar from pretty much day 1, I recently got surprised by the fact I can just cut and paste files from some zip files without needing to extract. In some cases that kind of direct approach was really handy but I was confused why some Zips didn't do that the same way. 1:46 Oh so that only got added later? Yeah okay I got into winrar in XP days so figures that I never knew this I guess
Yeah, Zip Folders features wasn't available in Windows 98 or Windows 2000; it could be added by installing Microsoft Plus! product. Later, Windows XP had it out of the box.
Another thing about zip folders is that the "file preview" feature, where it shows a snap of an image or video for large icons, doesn't work in a zip folder. It'll only show the default icon for that file type.
I was bored one day during the pandemic an built a gzip decoder in filemaker, there's something satisfying about seeing the process in action ... slowly.
Windows's built in zip/rar support is much appreciated, but also has a lot to improve on. Most of the time it's slow as hell, taking about twice as much time, if not more, than WinRAR. If that wasn't enough it also throws out corruption errors fairly often even if the files are perfectly fine and extracting with winrar instead works perfectly fine
A feature of WinRAR that I don't know if anyone ever noticed before was that it would extract DLL's when you double click to run an executable from inside of an archive, of any format that it could handle. I haven't used it in about two decades, so I don't know if it extracted all DLL's in the same folder or if it scanned the .exe file to look for imports, but when I used it on Win98 it always just worked.
Kinda reminds me how I had Worms Armagedon on my school's server without our IT guy being able to find it, because we had .bat file on usb that was unpacking the game for us to play and deleting the unpacked game when we were done. All done on server itself, since it was an actual PC, unlike our workstations that struggled to run WinXP in less than 5 minutes. (From loading OS screen to actually usable OS desktop).
WinRAR has been great using it for encryption and best compression. Fun fact, Google Driver's copyright scanner won't work on encrypted files, and there's an easy "store" option for no compression.
actually 7z has slight better compression in most cases, but winrar has better file recovery options, like your file can suffer a ton of bitrot or damage and the data can be rebuilt, on 7zip the whole thing is lost
2:52 Wow Linus or whoever wrote the script showing their age by using an archaic method. You've been able to type %blah% into the search bar since Windows 7 and probably Vista.
I wish we would use other compressed formats more, sometimes zip files are not able to get as much compression as some other algorithms but for compatibility I have to use them instead. That and some other algorithms are really fast which can be better for some tasks.
@@linuxization4205 Yeah that is a sad story. but its not like the XZ problem is unique to open source... it's unique that someone was able to find it though. See this level of patient supply chain attack (or some variant) is possible against proprietary software... just with different execution. Best thing we the community can do is to offer to help those thanklessly maintaining things by asking what they need. And I point a computer at their crypto addresses when I find them and mine for them... I'm poor so I cannot pay them but I can let my laptop mine them monero when I have access to free power (solar that someone I know has to curtail because they have more than they're allowed to under the new rules... so they just put a heater outside or let me put my computers there and run them full power.)
@@overbored1337 Modern CPUs are crazy fast, fast enough that a lot of algorithms are able to be executed way faster than even super fast SSDs can keep up. There are also algorithms that are better for multiple core CPUs. Personally, I want to see more compression if possible and try to front-load the work so that the compressor does most of the work if possible (I don't do much algorithm design). Reason is that we typically only compress once but we might decompress lots of times. From what I gather it is mostly because zip is the default in windows and is named zip. It can use several algorithms, but among those is the ancient DEFLATE and we have much more modern algorithms these days.
@@asificam1 the point is that zip is able be efficient on a vast amount of different devices, making it a good reason for a standard. And anyone is free to use other formats that compress better as they see fit, but that doesnt mean that it should be a new standard. Besides, more and more fileformats are getting compressed internally, so soon it wont matter and zip will just be a container
Pismo File Mount is another way to have a compressed file seen in read and write as if it is a folder and also supports encryption .. both compression and encryption are done on the fly.
I'd say "7zip FTW" but since moving to Linux it turns out all of that stuff is just built into the OS so you don't have to go fetch something just to open a file someone compressed 7zip FTW BTW
Another good reason to use 7zip is that windows only supports .zip, while 7zip can deal with it's own files (7z), rar and many more, which you will encounter over the internet depending on what you're doing.
Can we get a follow-up video on how file compression & decompression works? i.e. how computers automagically make files smaller without destroying data?
It just detects patterns and encodes instructions on how to restore the data, usually by copying data from somewhere else in the data. Modern compression use prediction instead, trying to predict the next bit/byte and encode the error.
My favorite feature of Windows 11 is the native rar and 7z format, meaning I don't have to other installing any zip software. My favorite feature of Windows 10 was mounting ISOs lol.
ISO mounting has been available since Windows 8 iirc, but yeah, totally agree on that, didn't like messing around with alcohol 120% or Daemon tools and was greatly surprised when I saw ISO support being added
@@ArchiWorldRuS a few things. But not as many as one can do today. I was just starting out then so I was pretty busy just learning how stuff worked. We could mount ISOs but we also had to mount any other media we wanted to read too. Which for me coming from the Microsoft world was a bit of a concept to wrap my head around. Things were harder to do back then for sure.
It is still engrained in me to download WinRAR as one of the first steps after reinstalling windows, even though i don't really need to anymore. Chrome, WinRAR, Cinebench, graphics driver, VLC Steam and Battlenet while doing initial windows updates are how i setup a fresh OS.
You only need to use the run prompt if you are on Vista or earlier. From Window 7, onward, you can type %temp% or %appdata% right into the address bar in windows explorer.
Yea. You should unzip files if you're handling them in any way. Not doing so and treating them like folders slows down anything you do with them, and if you're gonna use the excuse that you're saving space, then, if that's the issue, buy a larger SSD.
We should switch to file containers like the ones from cryptomator or veracrypt as they can be mounted as a new writable drive that all programs can work directly from
If memory serves me correctly, back in the day a lot of webhosts limited what file types could be hosted on their servers (I remember .exe files being commonly restricted), so basically everyone used .zip files even if they were only storing one file and didn't need compression.
As someone who often making shite out of image editor software (let's just say photoshop) the only reason I would unzip the zip file is just to see the thumbnail of an image or video so I don't click one by one to see the correct jpg or png or mp4 files.
Anyone remember .cab files? Anyway, they aren't folders really. A zip file is just that, a file. It,s a level of abstraction Windows added to explorer to help users visualise the archive.
The way it’s handled is confusing. Once I spent half an hour trying to help my cousin run a software that would always fail to root his phone, until I noticed that the folder he had that software in… was a zip. Extract everything on the desktop, boom done first try.
Guess WarThunder is the right sponsor for this video. No one else is better in UNZIPPING classified military documents. Thanks for the quality content tho
Back in 1989 when ZIP was first invented, being able to compress files was a ***VERY*** big deal. At 2,400 bits-per-second every single byte mattered! (Yes, I said BITS - not kilobits or megabits! Downloading was insanely slow back then!)
In the document example, if the images were embedded in the document file, the image files wouldn't be located externally from the document file, but included within the document file. I believe you meant "linked' to the document file. /nitpick
A lot of government files are sent through encrypted zip files and when people at work try to open them up they just get an error message they don't know what needs a password. So I tell them to install win zip so they can actually open up the file with a password
tldr: if you open one thing in a zip, it will unzip only that one thing. But that one thing might need the rest of the things and if you just clicked on one thing the rest of the things stayed in the zip. This is okay for images, videos etc but not okay for executables that expect the rest of the files to be next to it.
Speaking of which, did you know that modern Microsoft Office files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) are basically just zipped folders? If you rename the file to a .zip extension, you can access many of the individual elements.
with 7zip smallest compress for most files are Archive Format : 7z Compression Level 9 - Ultra Compression Method LZMA2 Dictionary Size : 1536 MB Word Size : 273 Solid Block Size : Solid Number of CPU Threads : 2 this requires more then 16 gb ram as you wil see in memory usage for compression note increasing the threads benefits in speed and in most instances the file size end result will be the same as the lower threads but there are cases were 2 threads still result in a smaller archive but it is a margin of a few kb's for winrar Archive Format : RAR Compression Method : Best Dictionary Size : 128 MB then in archiving options "Create Solid Archive" this is much lighter compression then 7 zip and yes it wil be bigger then 7z but often smaller then badly compressed 7z/winrar archives
i keep having to send an email to other departmats of my company that they do not and should not zip files for email. and then send them the same email again
I finally gave in and bought winrar last year as a thank you for the free access over the years, felt it was the least I could do for all the use I get from it
There's really no reason to zip files, the idea was to compress them to make a smaller download. Now all it does it put them in a folder together; most times they are 0% compressed anyway.
Microsoft should add the functionality to the filesystem so that file.zip is treated as an actual valid folder. Remember you can compress folders but that ability doesn't automatically treat zip files as simple compressed folders. It should. In other words, treat the zip file as if it was a folder with an attribute set to compressed.
Since that's how Windows treats them without an additional archival program installed on the system that takes over the opening and therefore changes the icon of the file?
