What is zoo file?

Zoo file is a file compression and archiving format created by Rahul Dhesi in the early 1980s. It was designed as a replacement for the traditional ARC archive format, offering improved compression ratios and faster compression and extraction speeds. Zoo files use a combination of a dictionary-based algorithm and a run-length encoding algorithm to compress data.

Zoo files are commonly used to archive and compress files on DOS and Windows systems. They typically have a ".zoo" file extension. Zoo archives can contain multiple files and directories, which can be extracted using a zoo file archiver or extractor program.

While zoo files were popular in the 1980s and 1990s, they have since been largely replaced by more modern archive formats such as ZIP, RAR, and 7-Zip. However, zoo files can still be found in legacy software archives and collections.