BBS The Documentary: Episode 8 of 8: COMPRESSION (The ZIP vs. ARC Story)

Episode 8 of 8 of the BBS Documentary, a mini-series by Jason Scott. As a coda to the series, this short film tells the backstory behind the ARC vs. ZIP battle of the 1980s, where two family businesses used the entire BBS subculture as a warzone over the battle for a compression algorithm, resulting in a clear winner, or perhaps no winner at all. BBS Documentary Information: Long before the Internet escaped from the lab, connected the planet and redefined what it meant to use a was a brave and pioneering band of computer users who spent their time, money and sanity setting up their home computers and phone lines to welcome anyone who called. By using a modem, anyone else who knew the phone number of these computers could connect to them, leave messages, send and recieve files.... and millions did. They called these places “Bulletin Board Systems“, or BBSes. And their collections of messages, rants, thoughts and dreams became the way that an entire generat