Long ago, in earlier days, there were two programs that came close to being as ubiquitous as Microsoft's (in)famous MS-DOS: PKZip and it's sister, PKUnzip. Long before the Internet was a mass market product, computer users eager to connect to others were filling up BBS discussion boards and file archives by the millions. And the compression software of choice for those DOS users was PKZip.

When OS/2 started gaining popularity outside the corporate world in the early nineties however, PKWare stumbled and fell (in the OS/2 world that is). While a native version of PKZip and PKUnzip were available for OS/2, they were not as feature rich as their DOS counterparts. More importantly, the nice people at Info-Zip went and created an alternative to the PKWare's products: Zip and Unzip for OS/2.

By now, if you're reading these words, you know that Info-Zip's free compression and decompression utilities are probably the most commonly used OS/2 software on the planet. These utilities are free and they work great, but they've always had one nagging problem -- unlike their DOS counterparts, they do not have the ability to spread a zipped file over more than one floppy disk. This feature is planned for a future release of Zip but there may be no need.

The reason there may be no need, is a simple, effective and brilliantly useful shareware utility called Slice/2 and its companion software, Splice/2.

Slice/2 is an old (circa 1992) command-line utility that does exactly what you would imagine: it takes a file and slices it up, storing it on multiple floppy disks, prompting you each time it fills one and needs another.

Splice/2 does the opposite: takes sliced files and reconstructs them on (presumably) your hard drive.

Both utilities do the job that Zip and Unzip fail to do. These programs are dead simple and tiny (each program is under 10K). You can even store sliced files on floppy disks containing other data. This means that the Slice/2 program uses every byte of storage on a floppy whether it is 1.44 MEG, 740K, or just a spare 20K. It's a dream come true for people with tons of smaller files and some larger ones they need to get off their hard drives. The utilities can even dissect and reconstruct files onto (or from) as many as 999 floppy disks (if you have a file that large).

If you are like many OS/2 users out there that have yet to upgrade to a Zip, EZ135 or higher capacity removable drive and you want to clean up the clutter on your hard disk, Slice/2 and Splice/2 are great ways to do so. Until Info-Zip gets around to updating Zip and Unzip to include such functionality, Slice/2 and Splice/2 are great solutions for anyone needing to stuff files onto archaic media.

Slice/2 & Splice/2 v1.0

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