Today, the ZIP file format is widely supported, with billions of such files in circulation. The receiver of a a ZIP file would then use a decompression program to extract, or 'unzip,' the file contents onto a user's computer. It also allowed for multiple files and folders to be grouped together ('zipped') and transferred as a single ZIP file. Using ZIP compression often saved minutes or even hours off of file transfers. At that time, file transfer speeds were much slower than today. The ZIP file format dates to the late 1980s when it received heavy use in pre-internet-era Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). The ZIP file format is very popular for efficiently storing and transferring groups of files in a variety of business and personal applications. ZIP files group together one or more files into a single file, called an archive, while at the same time compressing them and making them smaller.
