ZIP is a type of file first released in 1989 and that supports lossless data compression. ZIP files are usually presented as .zip or .zipx.
ZIP was developed by American computer programmer Philip Walter Katz as part of his software company, Pkware, own software development.
The Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) of ZIP files is com.pkware.zip-archive, while the standards used in the product are APPNOTE, also invented by Pkware and the ISO/IEC 21320-1:2015 (a subset of ZIP file format 6.3.3).
Over the years, ZIP files have proven to be so useful that they have been extended to other file formats, such as JAR (EAR, RAR (Java), WAR), Office Open XML (Microsoft), Open Packaging Conventions, OpenDocument (ODF), and XPI (Mozilla extensions).
The latest version of ZIP, version 6.3.4, was launched in 2014. However, this version only updated Pkware’s address office.
The previous version, released in 2012, was the last one to include significant changes to ZIP including document formatting changes.
