28 years later, Windows finally supports RAR files

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

“Oh, it’s segmented. You have to download this program to expand them, it’s called WinRAR. Much 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 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 bleak and dark the future would be? How could he predict that Windows would go back to sequential numbering, but skip the 9? And how did you know that I am so, let’s say thrifty, that instead of paying $30, for more than two decades I would try to do my homework on WinRAR fast enough that the “Buy WinRAR license” pop-up didn’t do it? t have a chance to appear?

Yes, it has taken the better part of three decades for the .rar file to finally be compatible with Windows without any additional software. Back in the ’90s, it was just one of several competing compression apps (or, as they were called back then, “apps”), with the purpose of shrinking collections of files so they could be transferred more efficiently. via our woefully slow internet.

How long did it take us to download the After Dark Star Trek screensaver set from the dial-up BBS, using the WhiteKnight telnet application, you ask? Overnight. It was, after all, just over five megabytes. But if it hadn’t been a .sea (self-extracting file) courtesy of Stuffit, we would have been waiting until well into the next day.

Yes compression was a must back then, in my case as a young software pirate but of course in more legitimate ways such as software distribution and actual “archiving” purposes. I can’t say if WinRAR was as common among businesses as it was among buyers of illicitly duplicated games and applications. But the fact that it has lived a full 30 years from its original development as a DOS program (28 since it came to Windows), to its most recent release, last week, and is still small enough to fit on a 3.5″ floppy disk: suggests you have found your niche.

However, with the passage of time, the need for applications like WinRAR has decreased as both drive capacity and network bandwidth have increased exponentially. The handful of megabytes that once took me all night to download and made up a sizeable proportion of my hard drive are now the bare minimum to transfer in a single second if you want to call your connection “broadband”. In addition, open source standards and options have proliferated, such as the libarchive project.

So at some point, someone at Microsoft must have gotten fed up with rushing their .rar operations like I have for 20 years and thought, there must be a better way. And then, under the subheading of “Reduction of hard work”, we got some useful UI updates, then coincidentally and for no reason, this:

Besides…

We’ve added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz, and many others using the open source libarchive project. You can now get improved performance of file functionality during compression on Windows.

Of course, the library has been integrated with other operating systems for a long time, and native support for .rar files is outdated for many. But for me personally this change is seasonal.

I’ve still found uses for WinRAR over the years, some legal, some… maybe most not so legal. And it has never been lost on me that, in the midst of my hacking, I was doubly a hacker, as it was several decades past the end of my 40-day WinRAR trial period. When I was lacking in alacrity (my APM has dropped lately) I would see that annoying screen and think: am I really that mean? Will I really keep abusing this poor shareware for my whole life? When will I take the straight and narrow path again (if ever to begin with) and make an honest WinRAR app?

Reader, I bought WinRAR.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch

It seems only fair that I would pay the cost of a coffee, as you know, around $31 these days, to support a piece of software that is among the very, very few to travel with me for much of my computing life. Few other programs have been such a constant companion, though I’d pay for Winamp if I could.

(Also, I haven’t upgraded to Windows 11 and won’t until there’s no other option, so I don’t get the benefit of this particular integration.)

I don’t know what the future holds for WinRAR; I asked the company what it thinks it will mean for its software and its business if Windows officially adopts the format and will update it if I hear back.