Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:17999 comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d:693 Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!ur-tut!ur-valhalla!venus.ee.rochester.edu!davis From: davis@venus.ee.rochester.edu (Al Davis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: PK361.EXE Message-ID: <1422@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu> Date: 10 Aug 88 22:02:12 GMT References:<356@marob.MASA.COM> <11814@steinmetz.ge.com> Sender: usenet@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu Reply-To: davis@ee.rochester.edu (Al Davis) Organization: UR Dept. of Electrical Engg, Rochester NY 14627 Lines: 44 bill davidsen writes..... > What's not standard is to write Wordstar or 1-2-3 files which can not > be read by the original program. The idea seems to be "once you use my > program you can never go back." A few years ago, ARC changed the format on a regular basis. It was annoying. ARC 4 would not read files created by ARC 5, etc. SEA was changing the format several times a year, and was much criticized for it. There was no way to get backward compatibility. ARC would say "I think you need a newer version of ARC". Also, ARC was too slow, so I didn't use it. Around the time PKARC became available, ARC "improvements" came to a halt. Stability at last. Also, PKARC was fast enough to be useful. When PK added squashing, he put in a switch to turn it off. He preserved backward compatibility, something SEA never did. Still, SEA sat on their butt. No attempt to meet the competition by improving the product. There were two logical improvements: PK compatibility, and make it faster. There are two reasons I can see for not keeping up: don't care and don't know how. Since after over a year of silence, the next step was call the lawyer, ovbiously the reason was don't know how. I wonder who really wrote ARC. The real improvements to ARC in the last year did not come from SEA, but from others working with the published source. I would hope that shareware would be immune from this nonsense: an area where the superior product, not superior legal staff, wins. I wonder who the real winner is. Can someone post an alternative to ARC in source form for UNIX systems? -al davis