RAR was great at the time because it offered "solid" archiving like a tar/gz com...

teddyh · on July 4, 2019

> Zip and ARJ both compressed at the file level rather than the archive level.

No. You may be thinking of gzip, a spiritual successor and replacement for the Unix compress/uncompress (and even earlier pack/unpack).

But both ZIP and ARJ, and the earlier ARC, all made multiple-file archives.

Or did you mean that the compression was “carried over” from file to file inside the archive?

gdy · on July 4, 2019

The latter.

gdy · on July 4, 2019

And now, IMHO, it is great because of its Fastest mode - it is really fast and at the same time compresses quite well.