zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Tony Duell]

> My point at the beginning of the thread was that I don't think
> archive programs should be damned simply because they run on a
> certain platform.  That's extremely narrow thinking.  (I'm not
> accusing you of that at all, just commenting on the thread responses
> in general.)

I would certainly claim an 'archive program' should be damned if it isn't 
'open' -- that is to say if there is not an adequate sprcification of the 
archive format to allow an extractor to be written for any platform 
(subject to limitations on disk space, memory, etc). 

However popular a machine is now, there will come a time when there are 
none still running (and I suspect this will be true of modern PCs long 
before it's true of things like PDP11s, but I digress). I feel it's very 
unlikely that our archive of boot disks will survive and no copies of a 
now-common archive program specification will remain, though.

-tony