If you haven’t heard until now of WinRAR, either you were born yesterday, didn’t see a computer in your entire life or you’re an alien. WinRAR is a software used for archiving / compressing and unpacking digital content, created in 1955 by Eugene Roshi.
At that time, WinRAR was a revolution in the field because it had a far more efficient way to compress data than the rival WinZIP. You have to remember that in 1995 we were still playing with 3,5 inch diskettes, and a better compaction method meant that you could copy the same data on fewer disks. Not only you saved diskettes money, but if you had more diskettes containing a program, it was more likely that after that one diskette would give an error when copying from it. Furthermore, with WinRAR you could create volumes (componing parts of the same archive) of various sizes, depending on the size available on disks.
I remember that by 1996 I had to have on my computer both WinZIP and WinRAR, in order to open archives created by those programs each. This changed later, when RAR became a multi-archiver capable to open other types of archives like ZIP, LZH, GZ, BZ2, TAR, ARJ and JAR. Another innovation of WinRAR was the self extracting archives. In other words, you could create a RAR archive and open it on another computer that had no unpacking software installed on it.
In the “modern age”, with WinRAR you can even open ISO archives / images. Roshal’s software is capable of even repairing and reconstructing archives affected by data transfer.
OK, in the past, when you had a small hard disk of just a few MB, the purpose of this kind of program was obvious, but now when we can afford storing capacities of up to 1 TB, what’s the point of archiving something anymore? Well, WinRAR is extremely efficient when you want to send executable files over the Internet. You will notice that not even Yahoo!, nor Google with their Gmail do not give you the permission to attach .exe files, but if you archive it prior to that, it will work very well. Also, think about the data transfer through the peer to peer networks or torrents. If the data were not to be archived, it will take you almost double the time and double bandwidth to download it on your computer.
WinRAR is a shareware program, which in theory means that you have to pay money to use it. Well, this is not really the case. You can use it as long as you want, but if you haven’t bought it, when you start the application a message will appear on your screen suggesting you to buy it, which can be pretty frustrating when you use it pretty often. The newest version is 3.93 and you can download it from here or from WinRAR official web site .
In the future I don’t think that unpacking programs will disappear even if the transfer speed of data over the Internet increases. Why? Because the size of multimedia files is increasing also. If a few years ago you could settle for a 700 MB sized DivX movie, now you probably want to download the DVD version, that has about 4,5 GB or even the HD version, that has 40GB. So the need for compacting data won’t disappear because the need for a faster data transfer will still be there.
