

They wanted to imply that their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time. The name "zip" (meaning "move at high speed") was suggested by Katz's friend, Robert Mahoney. The format was created after Systems Enhancement Associates (SEA) filed a lawsuit against PKWARE claiming that the latter's archiving products, named PKARC, were derivatives of SEA's ARC archiving system. ZIP file format was designed by Phil Katz of PKWARE and Gary Conway of Infinity Design Concepts.

The ZIP format was then quickly supported by many software utilities other than PKZIP. This format was originally created in 1989 and was first implemented in PKWARE, Inc.'s PKZIP utility, as a replacement for the previous ARC compression format by Thom Henderson.

The ZIP file format permits a number of compression algorithms, though DEFLATE is the most common. A ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed. ZIP is an archive file format that supports lossless data compression.
