They wanted to imply that their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time. The name "zip" (meaning "move at high speed") was suggested by Katz's friend, Robert Mahoney. He created the format after his company had lawsuits filed against him by Systems Enhancement Associates (SEA) claiming that his archiving products were derivatives of SEA's ARC archiving system.
The zip file format was created by Phil Katz of PKWARE.
Please help improve this article if you can the talk page may contain suggestions. This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.