Pkzip is made by <a href=http://www.pkware.com/>PKWare</a> (you can download PKZip for DOS from that site; Spatvark, from the looks of the link, only gave you pkzip.exe itself. Downloading from pkware will also give you pkunzip and zip2exe.

pkzip was around for at least a decade before WinZip. I still use the DOS version when I'm in DOS, WinRAR (even to create .zip archives) when I'm in 'Doze, and GNU Tar with gzip to create archives in Linux--although I usually wind up converting those to .zip before uploading them anywhere.

ZIP is the most common form of archive on the 'net, but RAR does give better compression. Also WinRAR allows you to split your files into segments of ANY SIZE, and keeps track of where in a multi-volume archive it is using the filename, not the disk label--meaning if a floppy goes kaput, you only need to get one segment of the file, whereas with a multi-volume zip file, one corrupt disk ruins the entire archive.

I believe that you get winrar from <a href=http://rarsoft.com>rarsoft.com</a>, but last time I tried to download WinRAR by typing the address from memory into the address bar, I got a porn site. If you're surfing from school, I strongly reccommend you use google to get a certain link to the WinRAR homepage.