StuffIt Expander

StuffIt Expander was a freeware decompression utility which could expand a wide variety archive formats. It did not compress files like its commercial sibling StuffIt Deluxe. It was often included with classic Mac OS and very widely used. As Apple included its own Archive Utility with Mac OS X, its usage declined and was finally discontinued in 2019.

History
The original StuffIt was written in the summer of 1987 by Raymond Lau for 68k Macs running System 4 at the time. It was updated by Leonard Rosenthol, who developed the standalone Expander version, with support for System 7 and then for PowerPC. The distribution rights to StuffIt was acquired by Aladdin Systems.

The original version only expanded the original StuffIt 1.x style Macintosh archives; Lau later updated it to support Compact Pro (.cpt) archives as well. When Aladdin acquired it, they added support for Disk Doubler archives and other formats. Aladdin was purchased by SmithMicro, at which point it became a generic unarchiving solution and could handle pretty much every archive and encoding format available for the Macintosh, Windows and Linux operating systems. Versions were made available for both Mac OS X and Windows.