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ARC is a lossless data compression and archival format by (SEA). It was very popular during the early days of networked BBS. The file format and the program were both called ARC. The ARC program essentially made obsolete the use of combinations of the SQ program to compress files and the LU program to create .LBR archives by combining the functions of both compression and archiving into a single program. ARC compresses multiple files into one - but unlike ZIP, not entire directory trees. The .arc format was the subject of quite a bit of controversy in the 1980s - an important event in the open source debate.
.arc is often also used as a file extension for several different file types that have in common that they are some kind of archive files.
In the late 1980s a dispute arose between SEA, maker of the ARC program, and PKWARE (Phil Katz Software). SEA sued Katz for trademark & copyright infringement. The most damning evidence at trial was from an independent software expert appointed by the court to compare the two programs. He stated that PKARC was a derivative work of ARC, pointing out that comments in both programs were often identical and misspelt. Henderson won the law suit. This quickly expanded into one of the largest controversies the BBS world ever saw.
The Internet Archive uses their own ARC format for storing multiple web resources into a single file [1][2].
- .arc (all systems)
- .ark (adopted by some bulletin boards as a naming convention indicating that the file contained software for CP/M rather than MS-DOS).
- .sue (due to all the legal issues)
See also
External links
- ARC - free software Linux/Unix port of the .arc compression program
- nomarch - another free software .arc compression program for Linux/Unix
- The BBS Documentary: Compression - A documentary that discusses ARC history, in the context of BBS
- [3] Specification of an ARC file format used by archive.org
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