WinZip is a commercial file archiver for Microsoft Windows users, developed by WinZip Computing (formerly known as Nico Mak Computing). It uses PKWARE's PKZIP format, and can also handle a number of other archive formats. It is a commercial product with a free evaluation version.

WinZip began life around the early 1990s as a shareware GUI frontend for PKZIP. Somewhere around 1996 the creators of WinZip incorporated compression code from the Info-ZIP project, thus dispensing with the need for the PKZIP executable to be present

Features

• Packing and extracting PKZIP format archives.
• Supports a number of other archive formats, ARC, ARJ, LZH with external programs.
• WinZip 9.0 supports 128- and 256-bit key AES encryption, which provide much greater cryptographic security than the traditional Zip 2.0 encryption method used in earlier versions of WinZip. WinZip 9.0's advanced encryption (FIPS-197 certified) uses the Rijndael cryptographic algorithm which, in 2001, was specified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Publication 197 as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

See also

• List of file archivers
• Comparison of file archivers

External link

• WinZip home page