DWC

Revision as of 15:34, 14 February 2020

DWC is a compressed archive utility and file format that was patterned after ARC, but is not compatible with that format. It was designed to be faster and more compact than ARC, but have similar functionality. Its compression scheme is based on LZW.

It includes a utility to make self-extracting archives.

Discussion

DWC was created by Dean W. Cooper in 1986 as a higher performance alternative to the ARC (both ARC & PKARC) and ZOO file archiving tools. The file COMPARE.DOC (in e.g. version A5.01) reports both compression and time improvements over DWC's competitors.

Source code for some versions prior to A5.01 was apparently made public, but we have not located any copies.

The documentation says that in 1988 the compressor/decompressor source code rights were sold to a company called DS Technologies.

Identification

Files end with a 27-byte trailer that starts with bytes 1b 00 (the trailer size) and ends with ASCII "DWC". There is no header or signature at the beginning of the file.

Specifications

• Archive format info, including DWC
• DWC format info, from Corion.net and FileFormat.Info

Software

• DWC (DOS binaries)
  • Ver. A4.95 (1988-03-15)
  • Ver. A5.01 (1988-05-31)
  • Ver. A5.10 (1990-03-07)

Further reading

• ARC/ZIP Perspective by Dean W. Cooper