---
title: "Tar Is for Tape Drive"
category:
- blog
abstract: Exploring IT history to understand current quirks
date: 2023-04-12T17:17:07+02:00
year: 2023
draft: false
tags: 
- tar
- tarball
- Unix
- POSIX
- computer-history
---
One of the things I never knew I wanted to know: 

> tar creates and manipulates streaming archive files. 
> (source: man tar(1))

Tarball is a file standing for the drive:

> A tar archive consists of a series of file objects, hence the popular term tarball, referencing how a tarball collects objects of all kinds that stick to its surface.
> (source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarball_(computing)))

This explains two things I never got about tar:
- It's slow. The tarball represents a physical tape, so to get a file from it, tar must virtually forward it to the needed position.
- It's not compressed, as otherwise, the computer would need to read the entire tape into memory, extract it and work on that.

Tar is one of the things where computer archeology makes things clearer. Nowadays, we often forget that computers have a history and a lot of things we take for granted need to be invented. Many quirks can be understood if we explore the past a bit.