Rarlab [work]

And at the heart of that format sits a small, stubborn company called Rarlab. No campus. No IPO. No drama.

Roshal does something radical: he designs a new compression algorithm from scratch. Not a tweak. Not a fork. A true original. He calls it — Roshal ARchive .

The first version of WinRAR was released for 16-bit Windows 3.x, bringing a graphical interface to the RAR algorithm.

– RAR can create parity volumes (.rev files). If one part of a multi-part archive corrupts, you can rebuild it. For Usenet and early torrent users, this was magic. rarlab

Just a nag screen. And 40 billion clicks of “Close.”

Throughout the years, RARLAB has continued to innovate and improve its products. Some notable achievements include:

Three reasons:

In 1997, Roshal founded RARLAB, a company based in Russia, to manage the development and distribution of RAR software. Under RARLAB, the company expanded its product line to include additional tools, such as WinRAR, a popular Windows-based archiver, and RAR for Android.

As of 2025, WinRAR is at version 7.x. The changes are incremental: better RAR5 format, improved AES, support for Zstandard compression, and a dark mode (yes, it took 25 years). Rarlab’s website still looks like 1998. The download button is still honest.

RARLAB's products have had a significant impact on the digital world. With WinRAR, users can easily manage their digital files, reducing storage costs and improving data transfer times. The company's software has become an essential tool for: And at the heart of that format sits

Why hasn’t it changed? Because it works. And because Rarlab (the company name, a portmanteau of Roshal and lab ) operates on a philosophy alien to Silicon Valley: If it isn’t broken, do not “disrupt” it.

The result? Estimates suggest that have used WinRAR. Fewer than 5% have paid for it. And Rarlab is perfectly fine with that.

The year is 1993. The internet is still a dial-up screech. Hard drives are measured in megabytes. In Chelyabinsk, Russia—a city better known for tanks and heavy industry—a software engineer named begins writing a file archiver. No drama

RARLAB GmbH was formally established in Germany to oversee the continued development and promotion of these tools.