How XTree got a second life
- 1993
An offer XTree turned down
Kim Henkel, in Boronia near Melbourne, asked The XTree Company for a 32-bit, multi-threaded XTreeGold that could log CD-ROMs under OS/2, and offered to write it himself. They declined.
- 1993–95
ZTreeBold, then ZTreeWin
He wrote an OS/2 prototype in a few weeks and colleagues wanted copies, so it became shareware. When Symantec retired XTree, ZTree came to Windows 95 and NT with long filenames and no 640 KB limit.
- 1998
PC Magazine
John C. Dvorak wrote that "ZTree's as good as it gets." Downloads quadrupled overnight, and Symantec agreed to let ZTree keep XTree's look and feel.
- 2001
Millions of files
A user logged 4,498,178 files on a single drive. Users included IBM, Exxon, Boeing, Philips, Motorola, American Express, J.P. Morgan and NASA.
- Today
Still going
ZTreeWin 2 runs natively on 32- and 64-bit Windows, with new betas published regularly on ztree.com.
ZTree Win doesn't have customers. It has paying fans.
files logged on a single drive, the record ZTreeWin users were trading in 2001