NABOB

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NABOB was a joke file compression and archiving tool created by Thomas M. Tuerke (SysOp of Gravesend BBS) and Al Kalian (SysOp of Palladin BBS) at the height of the compression wars that resulted from the legal conflicts between ARC and Phil Katz. In response to so many tools touting the effectiveness of their compression algorithms over those of the opposition, and a proliferation of tools and archive formats, Tuerke and Kalian created NABOB, with accompanying documentation that claimed it to be the ultimate archiving tool yielding better compression than any of the others.

Its user interface was designed to imitate those of ARC, PKARC, LHA, and (early versions of) PKZIP. After presenting a convincing display of compressing files, including a progress meter as "compression" was occurring, NABOB would create "archive" files containing solely a single character, character code 1 (which would display as a smiley face character when the file contents were displayed on IBM PC systems).

In another swipe at the marketing of compression tools at the time, where utilities capable only of uncompression would be distributed freely and the concomitant compression utilities would require payment (c.f. RAR/UNRAR, PKZIP/PKUNZIP), NABOB was distributed as "compress only" tool.