But the fact that it has lived a full 30 years since its original development as a DOS program (28 since it arrived on Windows) - up until its most recent release last week, and still nearly small enough to fit on a 3.5″ hard floppy - suggests it found its niche.Īs time has advanced, however, the necessity of apps like WinRAR has diminished, as both drive capacity and network bandwidth have increased exponentially. I can’t speak to whether WinRAR was as common among enterprises as it was among procurers of illicitly duplicated games and applications. Yes, compression was a must back then, in my case as a young software pirate but of course in more legitimate ways like software distribution and actual “archival” purposes. sea (self-extracting archive) courtesy of Stuffit, we would have been waiting well into the next day. How long did it take for us to download the Star Trek set of screensavers for After Dark from the dial-up BBS, using the telnet app WhiteKnight, you ask? Overnight.

Back in the ’90s, it was just one of several competing compression apps (or “applications” as they were called back then) used to shrink collections of files so they could be more efficiently transferred over our woefully slow internet.

rar file to finally be supported in Windows without any kind of additional software. Yes, it has taken the better part of three decades for the. How could he know how grim and how dark the future would be? How could he predict that Windows would switch back to sequential numbering, but skip 9? And how did he know that I am so, shall we say, thrifty that rather than paying $30, I would wait for more than two decades just trying to get my task done in WinRAR fast enough that the “Please purchase WinRAR license” pop-up didn’t have a chance to appear? In retrospect, my friend’s comment was amazingly prescient. “No…but if you’re as cheap as I think you are, it’ll keep bugging you to for a quarter century until, in the grim darkness of 2023, Windows 11 finally supports the format natively.”

You have to download this program to expand those. Finally we push past the scams and porn to find an FTP server with a list of files labeled “.rar.

It’s 1999, and my friends and I are surfing warez sites using Internet Explorer on our 98SE gaming rig.

Download home good