ARJ

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ARJ is a tool for creating compressed file archives. It was invented by Robert K. Jung. ARJ stands for Archived by Robert Jung. It is no longer in wide use.

ARJ was one of two mainstream archivers during early and mid 90s. PKZIP was the other mainstream archiver. ARJ's compression is somewhat better to that of PKZIP 1.02, but ARJ is considerably slower than PKZIP (or it could be said that PKZIP is considerably faster, because PKZIP was one of the fastest archivers in its time). Parts of ARJ were covered by U.S. Patent 5140321 . It was available for license under more friendly terms than PKZIP.

Generally ARJ was less popular than PKZIP, but ARJ did enjoy popularity during the BBS era. This was largely due to ARJ's creation and handling of multi-volume archives (archives which are split into smaller files which are then suitable for dial-up transfers and floppy distribution) being much simpler and more inituitive than PKZIP's.

ARJ also allowed the user to alter the level of an archive's compression, making it popular on small packet mail networks such as WWIVNet and HOGnet, who used lower compression settings to take advantage of modem-based compression (such as MNP or v.42bis) in order to reduce the long distance bills which invariably came with membership in such networks.

Since those days, ARJ has lost much of its market share to other formats; the lack of a graphical interface has also contributed to its virtual disappearance from the desktop world.

Due to its well-designed archive splitting feature, some people who are used to ARJ still use it to do regular backup of hard disks by floppy disks. It should be noted that RAR (and WinRAR) also has very similarly designed archive splitting, but WinRAR became popular much later, in first years of 21st century. A very interesting ARJ's feature which seems to be missing from all the other popular archivers (March 2006), is the ability to add, delete and/or modify files in a multi-volume archive.