THE 40-DAY TRIAL THAT LASTED 30 YEARS

A kid from Chelyabinsk

On 10 March 1972, in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk in the Soviet Union, Eugene (Yevgeny) Roshal is born. He goes on to study at Chelyabinsk Technical University, today's South Ural State University.

Computers are scarce, disks are tiny and every byte is precious. Perfect conditions to raise someone obsessed with making files smaller.

RAR is born

Working in DOS, Eugene writes a new archiver and names the format after himself: RAR — Roshal ARchive.

It packs tighter than ZIP and can split one huge archive into a neat stack of volumes: .rar .r00 .r01 .r02... When the world runs on 1.44 MB floppies and 14.4k modems, that feels like magic.

WinRAR.exe

On 22 April 1995, WinRAR ships: RAR with windows, buttons and drag-and-drop. It becomes one of the most-installed programs on Earth, and its icon, a stack of books cinched with a belt, becomes instantly recognizable.

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

Two brothers, one archiver

Eugene also builds FAR Manager, a much-loved text-mode file manager. His older brother, Alexander Roshal, holds the copyright and handles licensing and distribution, so Eugene can keep doing what he does best: writing code.

Later, the Berlin-based win.rar GmbH takes WinRAR to the rest of the world, in dozens of languages.

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, and you click Close.

WinRAR's makers have been open that they are 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. It's an honor system that has run on hundreds of millions of PCs.

RAR5 grows up

WinRAR 5.0 brings the new RAR5 format: AES-256 encryption, BLAKE2sp checksums, and dictionaries up to 1 GB (up from 4 MB). The floppy-era format is ready for the terabyte age.

Cutting off the ACE

Researchers find a path-traversal bug in UNACEV2.DLL, a third-party library for the old ACE format that nobody had maintained since 2005. WinRAR 5.70 drops ACE support entirely.

💡 Moral of the story: keep your archiver updated. That copy from 2009 isn't a keepsake, it's a liability.

“This is fine.”

Microsoft announces native RAR support in Windows 11, built on the open-source libarchive. WinRAR answers with the burning-room “this is fine” dog: Us right now. #Windows11

Windows can open RARs now. Creating them, repairing them and adding recovery records still takes WinRAR.

The best week ever

Then something unexpected happens: people start buying licenses out of gratitude. Programmer Luca D'Amico posts his €25.57 invoice: This day has finally come. My winrar trial is over. ❤️

WinRAR celebrates: We're jumping for joy over here at WinRAR this week! 1,000 new followers and more than 4 sales! Best week ever! The hashtag #IBoughtWinRAR is born.

Version 7

WinRAR 7.00 raises the maximum dictionary size to a ridiculous 64 GB. Nearly three decades in, still shipping.

A $150 act of self-awareness

WinRAR teams up with fashion label tern on a messenger bag shaped like the famous books. It sells out. Their pitch: What better way to support the software you've NEVER paid for than by buying a WinRAR bag?

At $150, the bag costs about the same as five licenses.

Still here. Still asking nicely.

On 30 June 2026, WinRAR 7.23 lands with a straight face: Thanks to all of your recent payments, we've been able to develop a new version! In September, 7.30 beta 1 follows.

Over 500 million people use it. It started as one developer's archiver, and it still works on day 11,000-something of a 40-day trial. Maybe it's time to say thank you.