SoylentNews

owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

It’s 1999, and my friends and I are surfing warez sites using Internet Explorer on our 98SE gaming rig. Finally we push past the scams and porn to find an FTP server with a list of files labeled “.rar, .r00, .r01, r.02…” But what the hell are these?

“Oh, it’s segmented. You have to download this program to expand those. It’s called WinRAR. Way better than WinZip.”

“Do we have to pay for it?”

“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.”

Original Submission