It’s not garbage. It’s used in the pirate community and elsewhere because back in the day things were shared on the Usenet before they were shared anywhere else. There’s a limit for file size on the Usenet, so we needed to be able to break compressed files into multiple parts and have an easy way to put them back together when uncompressing. Win Zip did not have that functionality. You can thank WinRar for powering the entire sharing scene for decades. When torrent was becoming popular NO distributors shared on torrent. They shared on the Usenet. Then someone would take a Usenet share and post it to the torrent network. Torrent wouldn’t have had much success, or would have taken much longer to catch on if it wasn’t for WinRar and the Usenet.
It’s not garbage. It’s used in the pirate community and elsewhere because back in the day things were shared on the Usenet before they were shared anywhere else. There’s a limit for file size on the Usenet, so we needed to be able to break compressed files into multiple parts and have an easy way to put them back together when uncompressing. Win Zip did not have that functionality. You can thank WinRar for powering the entire sharing scene for decades. When torrent was becoming popular NO distributors shared on torrent. They shared on the Usenet. Then someone would take a Usenet share and post it to the torrent network. Torrent wouldn’t have had much success, or would have taken much longer to catch on if it wasn’t for WinRar and the Usenet.
7z works fine, and isn’t proprietary.
7 zip didn’t gain popularity until years later. WinRar was essentially free, since most people never bought the lifetime license.