The coin that pays your WinRAR debt.

1972

A kid from Chelyabinsk

Snow, smokestacks and red flags. Chelyabinsk is a Soviet factory city just east of the Ural Mountains, nicknamed Tankograd for the tanks it built during the war.

On 10 March 1972, Eugene (Yevgeny) Roshal is born here. Zhenya, for short.

Growing up

Zhenya grows up in the late Soviet years. Computers are rare, disks are tiny and every byte is precious. Perfect conditions to raise someone obsessed with making files smaller.

1985

The USSR makes informatics a school subject, and the first school computer classes appear. A whole generation types in its first programs, starting with 10 PRINT.

Next stop: Chelyabinsk Technical University, today's South Ural State University.

1993

RAR is born

Eugene tinkers with computers, learns to program and writes tool after tool, one late night at a time.

Working in DOS, he writes a brand-new archiver and names it after himself: RAR, short for Roshal ARchive.

One developer, one new format, and it squeezes files tighter than ZIP. It can also split a huge archive into a stack of floppy-sized volumes: .rar .r00 .r01... On 1.44 MB disks and 14.4k modems, that feels like magic.

1995

WinRAR.exe

On 22 April 1995, WinRAR ships: RAR with windows, buttons and drag-and-drop. Windows 95 arrives that August, and WinRAR makes itself at home on the new desktop.

It becomes one of the most-installed programs on Earth, and its icon, a stack of books cinched with a belt, becomes instantly recognizable. A legend of the desktop.

Right-click → “Extract Here” soon lives in the muscle memory of an entire generation.

1996

Two brothers, one archiver

Eugene keeps doing what he does best: writing code. (He also builds FAR Manager, a much-loved file manager.) His older brother, Alexander Roshal, holds the copyright and handles licensing and distribution.

Alexander takes WinRAR to the world. It travels by floppy, BBS and download site, and soon people in country after country are packing their files into RAR archives and sending them to each other: holiday photos, homework, game mods, drivers.

Since 2002, the Berlin-based win.rar GmbH sells it worldwide, translated into dozens of languages. One little archive format now connects people all over the world.

40

The 40-day promise

The shareware deal is simple: try it free for 40 days, then buy a license.

But on day 41... nothing happens. WinRAR keeps working. It shows a polite reminder, you click Close, and you carry on archiving. Day 400. Day 4,000. Still works.

WinRAR's makers have been open that they're relaxed about home users carrying on after the trial: companies buy the licenses, and a genuine free copy is far safer than a cracked one full of malware. An honor system, running on hundreds of millions of PCs.

2023

#IBoughtWinRAR

Then people start buying licenses out of gratitude, and bragging about it. Luca D'Amico posts his €25.57 invoice: This day has finally come. My winrar trial is over. WinRAR calls it the Best week ever! and #IBoughtWinRAR is born. Every receipt is a small act of justice.

2026

Still asking nicely

Over 500 million people use WinRAR. The first 40-day trial started ? days ago, and the nag screen is still just asking, politely.

RARcoin is born

One developer gave the world a compression format and an archiver it has used for free for three decades. $RAR is how we say thank you: a cut of every trade goes to WinRAR, and every $30 of it is another WinRAR license bought. It's time to pay back.