Now that hard drive capacity is measured in billions of bytes, compressing files to save space seems unnecessary. But when hard drives held 10 megabytes at best, compressing files made sense. It suddenly became possible, thanks to a program called PKZIP, to compress multiple files into one smaller file, then decompress the file when you needed to work on it.
It was sometime in the last century _ 1991 to be exact _ that WinZip, which was based on the DOS PKZIP program, was born. Windows made it far less nerdy than the DOS version. Hard drives still were tiny by today's standards, and WinZip, far easier to use, became the leading file-compression utility.
Fast forward to a few days ago, when a client sent me six files in zipped form that had been created on a Mac. Ever frugal, I balked at spending $30 for the Mac version of WinZip. But after trying several freeware programs that weren't up to the task, I downloaded the trial version (at www.winzip.com).
There are few things that make nerds _ I count myself among them _ smile more than using software that's so intuitive that reading the manual is as unnecessary as reading yesterday's newspaper. The headlines are stale, and you've seen the top stories played out repeatedly on CNN.
Permit me a digression. I spend the better part of the morning exercising on my recumbent bike while watching CNN and Fox News on my iPad. Cable news is one talking head after another pontificating on a rumor that the late Walter Cronkite could have handled well in a minute, if at all. But that's the way it was.
It occurred to me more than once that cable news producers could use a compression program for their endless, trivial newscasts. I watched Fox News spend hours on rumors that members of Congress would cancel their July 4 break to pass a medical reform bill. It was almost as torturous as pedaling 12 miles to nowhere.
Thank you for staying with me.
The latest version of WinZip for the Mac will compress and even encrypt just about any kind of file _ word processing, iOS, Android, MP3 and even files I've never heard of. Music files can be compressed without losing quality when the files are unzipped. It will help users back up zipped files to the cloud and it can be used on network drives as well. One thing I didn't try was zipping files for social media. I don't like Facebook and seldom look at YouTube, which makes me sort of a geek without portfolio.
The client's files were zipped so that they could be sent to me in one email. Many email providers limit the size of file attachments, and these were huge files containing graphics and photos. As I unzipped them in WinZip's version 6 for the Mac, I had the same feeling I had decades ago when I first used PKZIP. Purists like me rued the day when WinZip made the transition to Windows, but in those days, there still was the choice to run the DOS version.
That said, I zipped this column to about one-sixth its size, which was all it was worth. The temptation not to unzip it was great, but like unzipping what today passes for music, it lost none of its inanity.
