[cincinnatus]

I was sitting 10 feet from PK when a lot of these decisions were made, but you have to realize what a different time it was, and it how much becomes obvious only in retrospect.

There's more than a few misunderstandings and errors in the article but mostly it's a valid 20-20 hindsight perspective. We knew it at the time too; when a couple of us formed a different company later it was with the express idea that we knew all the things that sucked about .zip files and would love a do-over. We never got around to it though; our thinking at the time was to get established with other products first and then come out with a new format. Our initial stuff ended up being pretty successful and we exited to McAfee and didn't look back. Different times, maybe we did the world a disservice not tackling archiving first :-)

One note about putting "PK" on the file format. In the dev culture Phil learned his craft in there was no source control and change tracking. Files were exchanged via 'sneakernet'. This was true even at PKWare in the 89-91 timeframe. Change tracking was done via file renaming, and if you added a new variable you put your initials on it so if someone had a question they'd know who touched it. I used usenet at home but not at work.

Our communication to the outside world was an 8-line BBS in the next room and the EXECPC BBS that one of us would dial into at least once a day to answer questions on.

The multi-part/disk spanning stuff wasn't added until pretty late in the game, so it was kind of hacky. The format overall is what you get when something takes off and people start asking to use it in ways that weren't anticipated on day one but you want to maintain backwards compatibility. For sure time was spent answering questions from devs who were implementing their own versions, especially info-zip which was iirc the most important seeming effort at the time, and a guy that worked in the office a few nights a week on a port to a mainframe environment which escapes me at the moment.

It was pretty heady to be able to walk up to practically any computer on the show floor at Comdex and type 'pkzip' and get a response, but even then the idea of just how ubiquitous it would become was impossible to anticipate.