WinRK v2.16, v3.03

[encode]

WinRK - the best archiver ever. Strongest compression, a wide range of compression algorithms and compression settings. Original graphical user interface. However, due to poor market management, advertisement and business plan the project was failed and became not widespread. I always heavily inspired by the work of Malcolm Taylor, the PIM archiver is not exclusion. Today, find WinRK is not trivial task since the archiver homepage is not available. Anyway, here is a few files from my collection:
WinRK216.exe
WinRK303b.exe

[comp1]

WinRK - the best archiver ever. Strongest compression, a wide range of compression algorithms and compression settings. Original graphical user interface. However, due to poor market management, advertisement and business plan the project was failed and became not widespread. I always heavily inspired by the work of Malcolm Taylor, the PIM archiver is not exclusion. Today, find WinRK is not trivial task since the archiver homepage is not available. Anyway, here is a few files from my collection:
WinRK216.exe
WinRK303b.exe

Does anyone still have WinRK 3.0.3?

Thanks.

[kampaster]

3.0.3.0
http://www.sendspace.com/file/iensrw

[comp1]

3.0.3.0
http://www.sendspace.com/file/iensrw

You're great!
Thank you!

[Matt Mahoney]

Yes, it is too bad that strong archivers like WinRK, Compressia, and Nanozip have no chance against free, open source, and standardized formats like zip, so their business fails and the authors abandon them. Why would anyone use them and risk not being able to read their archives when the software goes away? Selling software used to work as a business model, but that was before the internet. Now we know the correct model is to give away software to sell yourself.

[comp1]

Yes, it is too bad that strong archivers like WinRK, Compressia, and Nanozip have no chance against free, open source, and standardized formats like zip, so their business fails and the authors abandon them. Why would anyone use them and risk not being able to read their archives when the software goes away? Selling software used to work as a business model, but that was before the internet. Now we know the correct model is to give away software to sell yourself.

Completely agree. It is a shame.

[Piotr Tarsa]

I think that there's a niche that could be profitable - compression and decompression on GPGPUs. Baby steps in GPGPU compression are already done - I'm meaning here the STx from libbsc.

[Matt Mahoney]

You could sell hardware like a GPU driven compression accelerator, or a disk or router with build-in compression. But the software is just a way of increasing the value of the hardware. If you are selling the hardware, then giving away the software will increase the value of your product.

Most software is free for a good reason. A typical free app gets about 10,000 downloads. If it costs USD $5 it gets about 100 downloads. So almost all software is free. Even with exceptions like Windows, most people don't buy the software. They buy a computer with the software already installed because most people won't buy a computer that doesn't work out of the box.

Think of information having negative value. You can make more money if you give away your code but charge others for the right to give away copies.

[Piotr Tarsa]

Typical user doesn't really care about compression as data is either compressed already (like multimedia or games or installers) or doesn't take much space (like documents). But one can target specific cases where end user doesn't have to be even aware of underlying compression. In case of GPGPU - the bottleneck is ofter loading data though PCI-Express but from system RAM or from disk (be it HDD or SSD, in RAID or not). If you design a decent compression algorithm that processes data at a rate much higher than the PCI-Express but allows or at least much higher than a standard HDD or SSD allows then your compression algorithm can boost performance of other algorithms that utilize GPGPU. Let's say that someone has algorithm which can use both GPU and CPU. By compressing memory on GPU you can effectively increase the usable memory space, so you can do more on the GPU and/ or you decrease the communication overhead.
GPGPUs are used most by gamers and by scientists, so by selling the software to game studios and technology centers one can earn some money, I think. Provided his algorithm is useful of course.

[comp1]

Does anyone have the 64-bit version of 3.0.3?

I'd like to try FPW1 and PWCM with 16GB of RAM

***EDIT*** Never mind ^^^...Editbin did the trick.

[Sportman]

WinRK 3.1.2 64-bit you can download here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110426.../webfm_send/20

[comp1]

WinRK 3.1.2 64-bit you can download here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110426.../webfm_send/20

Thanks but I was looking for 3.0.3.

But I do not need 64-bit version anymore... Used editbin with winrk.exe and now I can use full 2047MB PWCM.

Thanks.

[nikkho]

Indeed an amazing compression tool, which was even revolutionary and record breaking with its 2.0 release.
I liked its compression ratio, and the fact of being one of the first x64 compression tools available. It always had some bugs, speed was not that fast, and usability due to the graphics library used was not best.

Hope it will be opensourced, or continued at some point.

By the way, official web page, still exists: http://www.msoftware.biz/downloads