Compression

[wnkim at violet.berkeley.edu]

I'm fairly new to unix, and I was wondering if there is a program that can
uncompress .Z files on a PC?  That way I can transfer the compressed program
and save on d/l time, and uncompress it locally.  Or is there some other form
of compression that I can use on both unix and a PC?  TAR maybe?  I'm not
familiar with that either.  

Also, one more quick question...

Is it possible (I sure hope so) to list text files (the directory file         
description files in particular) when you're logged onto an FTP site?

Thanx a bunch!

.chem