Winrar in ancient times? Lol. People have been arching for a long time before that. Unix, amiga, apple, pc… that is a funny sentence.

Don’t remember PKARK, ARC, and PKWARE? Zip became popular after the battle with SEA.

I believe Winrar became popular because it was easier to use with multi volume archives. Which conveniently worked well with parity files, which all worked great for distributing on usenet.