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 a list of files on an FTP server, 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 of a century until, in the grim darkness of 2023, Windows 11 finally supports the format natively.”
In retrospect my friend’s comment was amazingly prescient. 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 for more than two decades just try to get my task done in WinRAR fast enough that ...
