ALZip is an

archive An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials, in any medium, or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organ ...

and

compression Compression may refer to: Physical science *Compression (physics), size reduction due to forces *Compression member, a structural element such as a column *Compressibility, susceptibility to compression * Gas compression *Compression ratio, of a ...

utility software Utility software is a program specifically designed to help manage and tune system or application software. It is used to support the computer infrastructure - in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that b ...

application developed by

ESTsoft Founded in 1993, ESTsoft is a South Korean application software development company. Its software ranges from desktop to business software for enterprises. Products There are several products marketed under the "ALTools" product line. In Korea, " ...

for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

that can unzip forty different archive file formats. ALZip can also archive files into eight different archive formats. Introduced in ALZip version 8, their own proprietary ALZ and EGG archive formats can be used, which supports Unicode, compression and other features.

History

ALZip was developed in 1999 as an internal application by the

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

n software company

in response to employees' frustration using the English interface in

WinZip WinZip is a trialware file archiver and data compression, compressor for Microsoft Windows, macOS, iOS and Android (operating system), Android. It is developed by WinZip Computing (formerly Nico Mak Computing), which is owned by Alludo. The p ...

. The Korean interface was immediately well received and later that year, ALZip was publicly released as

freeware Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...

. In just over a year, ALZip became the most popular archiver program in South Korea and by December 2001, was the top downloaded softwareMaeilkyungjae IT Internet (2001-12-03) in the country. By 2004, it had reached a 70%

market share Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a Market (economics), market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those ...

in South Korea. The popularity of the software and the ALZ and EGG archive format played a large role in earning ESTsoft a place in the Digital Innovation Awards Top 100 Companies in South Korea with the software taking special mention. The first English version was released in 2002. Since then, support for over 20 languages has been added. Version 11.07 is available through Microsoft Store.

Licensing changes

ALZip was originally released as pure

. In October 2001 it changed to free for home use with government usage requiring a

software license A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Since the 1970s, software copyright has been recognized in the United States. Despite the copyright being recognized, most companies prefer to sell lic ...

. In April 2002, a business license was also introduced for commercial usage. Licensing was based on the

honor system An honor system, trust system or honesty system is a way of running a variety of endeavors based on trust, honor, and honesty. The honor system is also a system granting freedom from customary surveillance (as to students or prisoners) with ...

, and there were no nag screens. With the version 7 release, the license was changed from freeware to

adware Adware, often called advertising-supported software by its developers, is software that generates revenue by automatically displaying Online advertising, online advertisements in the user interface or on a screen presented during the installatio ...

, displaying downloaded banner ads. Beginning on December 1, 2008, all new releases are

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

requiring a paid license except in its original Korean language, which requires no licensing fee. With version 8.51 from 22 August 2012, ALZip changed the license so that it can be licensed freely. On the download page of ALZip is a serial number to copy and paste when you start the program, in order to have the license for the software free of charge.

Naming and mascots

The name "ALZip" was chosen as the "AL" part is a transliteration from the program's Korean name "aljip" (

Hangul The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...

: ), literally ''EggZip''. Other ALTools feature similar egghead cartoon characters as mascots for each program. Additionally, ALZip integrates into the "New Folder" function of

Windows Explorer File Explorer, previously known as Windows Explorer, is a file manager application and default desktop environment that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user i ...

, where new folders are created with the option of using custom icons and names.

File format controversy

In 2003, there was a controversy over ALZip's own compression file format ALZ when a developer of another Korean compression utility, "빵집," insisted that ALZip users were forced to use the ALZip archiver when decompressing ALZ files. He also stated that ESTsoft does not offer decompression

libraries A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

, and that third-party archiver developers have had to use

reverse engineering Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompl ...

to develop their own algorithms.

EGG format and ALZ Algorithm

The ''EGG'' format is used to apply multiple different compression algorithms, choosing the algorithm based on the file extension. For example, it may use Bzip2 to compress .txt files, while using Deflate for files with a .exe extension. For .com or .sys files, ALZip uses the ALZ algorithm. The ALZ algorithm is slower but has a high compression ratio. It has a faster compression rate than the Deflate algorithm used in the ZIP format, and is comparable to the LZMA algorithm of

7-Zip 7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own Archive file, archive forma ...

. Reverse engineering revealed similarities between it and LZMA. It has been confirmed that

LZ77 LZ77 and LZ78 are the two lossless data compression algorithms published in papers by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv in 1977 and 1978. They are also known as Lempel-Ziv 1 (LZ1) and Lempel-Ziv 2 (LZ2) respectively. These two algorithms form the basis ...

is used.

References

External links

*
Flickr pages with various ALTools Eggheads

unalz
– Open-source decompressor for ALZip files, for Windows and Linux. {{DEFAULTSORT:Alzip Windows compression software ESTsoft