It definitely is more of a Windows thing, but that's not saying much, since it's not like Windows is this niche OS that no one uses. I'd actually dare to say that more people have heard of WinRAR than tar.gz.

WinRAR became popular at the time because the rar compression was superior to what zip offered (useful in the age of 1.44MB floppys) and the UX of the tool made creating, splitting and extracting archives easy for noobs.

It was a game changer in the days you would split a larger file into chucks the size of a 1.44MB floppy disk or several 650MB CDs. WinRAR made that process less of a headache for the non-tech-savvy user.

Same with WinACE which also dominated the scene for a while.

Spot on !

A lot of pirated games and office software were distributed as multi part RARs.

Uh, a friend told me.

Yeah the combination of multipart and solid archives (for higher compression ratio) was quite nice once upon a time. Also solid self extraction IIRC?

> Also solid self extraction IIRC?

Yeah, with a risk of trojans. The usual advice then (as now) was to open that self-extractor up in the decompressor (WinRar/7zip) and manually extract it that way instead of letting it run itself.

I paid WinRAR to use its zip function. There a lot of convenience features even if you don’t use rar format.

Would you mind listing some features you use? I use 7-zip and can't really think of anything i miss there

The only time I've used RAR is for Usenet downloads where there are also PAR files to repair any missing segments. And that was a decade ago.

Saving 25% compression vs zip/gzip on your 500 MB of code/text files doesn't matter anymore in 2023, all the files we really want to compress are already compressed (media files)

I think it had better multi-part archive support than zip (multipart zips were definitely a thing, but IIRC they were clunky and possibly non-standard) so became popular with pirates during the USENET era.