The origins of LHA

[AC/DC HACKER!]

Originally Posted by hth313

Zoo was quite popular in the early days. I think there was something in between like lharc(?), but then lha came around and it made smaller archives than anything else. I think it was also faster.

I think the reason it became the de-facto standard was that it was better than the alternatives and everyone just switched. This is as far as I remember it some 25 years later.

Whenever something new came around, we Amiga people were not afraid to try it. There was no "we have done it like that for 100 years" thinking in that community.

That was why I became very, very passionate about the Amiga and I didn't have any interest in Windoze for many years.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by phx

.... Also LHA was used on Fish disks...

And that is probably why almost everyone used it. That's why I would have started.
I picked up a lot of programs from FF disks back in the day...
And BBSes, which I am guessing got a lot of their programs from FF disks.
I do seem to remember a progression (might be faulty memory tho) of arc to zoo to lha...???

Looks like it:

The PKWare ZIP tool for the Amiga. Provides functions to create, examine,
extract, test, modify, display, and print files which are in the ZIP
compressed format Uses a full Intuition interface with no CLI support.

I seem to remember people in the Amiga BBS/FIDOnet community dismissing it because there was no CLI tool.

Do I remember correctly (probably not) that the the first version of PKZip for the Amiga was GUI only???? Or is that another bad memory? Time!! ;-)

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by demoniac

I think another reason why LZX wasn't more popular is that the authors only made the compressor on the Amiga side and the DOS version never arrived.

Lack of early portability made sure Aminet didn't use it. They needed a decompressor to check the contents of the archives.