• 1986: Apple shipped a Mac with an internal hard disk after over three years. Harry Chesley's [PackIt III] for compressing file archives was one of its early shareware apps. Emphasis was on archiving Mac file forks and restoring them rather than efficient compression.
• 1987: Raymond Lau, a 16-year-old high school student, developed [Stuffit], which quickly became the standard and most popular Mac shareware utility. It had few rivals until 2001.
• 1988: Aladdin Systems took over development and sales of Stuffit. In 2004, it changed its name to Allume Systems and was bought by IMSI. The following year, it was bought by Smith Micro Software, Inc.
• Stuffit products: Aladdin continued a shareware version (Stuffit Classic) and launched a commercial version (Stuffit Deluxe). It also had a freeware decompressor (Stuffit Expander) bundled in Mac OS X until 10.4 Tiger. There were self-expanding archive apps with the extension.sea.
• Add-in cards: Until mid-1990s, compression in software on Macs was slow. Sigma Designs' DoubleUp NuBus card compressed in real time using Salient Software's DiskDoubler.
• Stuffit Deluxe features: In 2003 (before being renamed Allume), Stuffit Deluxe had version 8.0.2 and supported conversion to/from BinHex encoding. DropStuff was a drag-and-drop tool for compressing into various archives with encryption and segmentation. It also managed archives in multiple formats and could schedule automatic creation.
• Decline of Stuffit: After Aladdin launched a Mac OS X version with new formats and support, Stuffit entered decline. Compression requirements changed in Mac OS X with less use of resource forks and free cross-platform tools.
• Other compression tools: In 2007, BetterZip supported a standard set of compression formats but didn't catch on. Cross-platform WinZip was first released for the Mac in 2010.
• Apple's compression tools: Apple started including compression tools in /System/Library/CoreServices. Archive Utility in Mac OS X 10.3 Jaguar (now with support for AppleArchive format) uses a modified Zip method. In 2020, macOS Big Sur introduced AppleArchive with system-level support for multiple compression methods.
• Apple silicon Macs: The arrival of Apple silicon Macs has expanded compression utility options, and freeware [Keka] gives users choices. Legacy copies of Stuffit are still available.