PT>As a side line it appears ZIP is the most popular compression program
PT>over all platforms.  Does anyone know how this came to be.  Did the
PT>PKWARE crowd somehow loose the code or did the INFO-ZIP crew do a
PT>reverse engineering hack job or by simply studying the file structure.
A brief history of the world 
In the beginning, there was ARC (from SEA) and it was okay (but slow).
Then PKWare came out with an ARC compatible program that was fast and 
ncluded
  an encoding method which SEA's ARC did not support.
SEA sued PkWare and won (actual details are not known since the actual court
  decision is sealed).  The end result was that PKWare had to stop all
  develpment on their ARC compatible program and hand over the source code of
  their program to SEA.
PKWare went to work on a newer (and better) compression routine.  When they
  released PKZip, they did publish an written translation of how the
  compression algorithms work so that others could write compatible routines.
  (PKWare does not release source code to their program.)
The BBS community basically adopted ZIP upon it's release and started dumping 
ARC.  Some BBS, converted all of their files from ARC to ZIP so that their
users would not need a copy of ARC either.  [This was a direct response to 
the 
ARC/ZIP lawsuit.  SEA won the lawsuit, but they lost the BBS Community's 
support.]
A couple of months later, SamSmith released the first ZIP decompressor 
  (written in Pascal) and released the source code for his code.  About this
  time, the InfoZip group started writing their ZIP/UnZIP routines.  They use
  some of Sam's code in their routine.  After InfoZip starting releasing 
their 
  "portable" source code, ZIP really began to grow in popularity.  Now, the 
  non-MS-DOS world could (more easily) share data files with MS-DOS based 
  systems.
Also since the ARC/ZIP "battle", there has been a number of other compression
routines.  They include (but are not limited to): ARJ, HAP, LHArc, RAR,
Squeeze, UC2.
 * KingQWK 1.05 # [PK] * Unzip, expand, explode; What pervert came up with 
this?
--- Maximus/2 3.01
---------------