WinZip is a commercial file archiver designed for Microsoft Windows users, developed by WinZip Computing (formerly known as Nico Mak Computing). It uses PKWARE's PKZIP format, and can also handle a number of other archive formats. It is a commercial product with a free evaluation version.
WinZip began life around the early 1990s as a shareware GUI frontend for PKZIP. Somewhere around 1996 the creators of WinZip incorporated compression code from the Info-ZIP project, thus dispensing with the need for the PKZIP executable to be present.
