Phillip Walter Katz (November 3, 1962 – April 14, 2000), better known as Phil Katz, was a computer programmer best-known as the author of PKZIP, a program for compressing files which ran under the PC operating system DOS.
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Early life
Phil Katz received a bachelor's degree in computer science from UW-Milwaukee. His first compression product was released in the mid-1980s with a program called PKARC. PKARC was compatible with the then-popular ARC program written by Thom Henderson, founder of SEA System Enhancement Associates. ARC was written in C, with the source code available on SEA's BBS. PKARC, written partially in assembly language, was much faster (back then, compilers were not as good at optimization as they are today). Katz had a special flair for optimizing code. Besides writing critical code in assembly language, he would write C code to perform the same task in several different ways and then examine the compiler output to see which produced the most efficient assembly code. PKARC's speed quickly made it more popular than the earlier program. He initially released only PKXARC, an extraction program, as freeware. Its much greater speed caused it to spread very quickly throughout the BBS community. Strong positive feedback and encouragement from the community caused Katz to first add a compression program, PKARC, and then to make his software shareware. PKARC, in addition to duplicating the compression techniques used in ARC, added an additional algorithm which produced smaller files. However, these files still used the file extension ".ARC". This led to the situation where files which appeared to be created by SEA's ARC could not be read by that program. System Enhancement Associates's Henderson considered this an appropriation of his product's trademarked name, and sued Katz. Katz withdrew PKARC from the market and instead released PKPAK, which was similar in all but name and the file extension used. System Enhancement Associates soon discovered that Katz had copied significant amounts of the copyrighted source code distributed with ARC. They sued for trademark violation and copyright infringement and won: Katz was forced to change the program.[1] According to expert witnesses hired by SEA, Katz had copied ARC's source code so extensively that even identical comments and spelling errors were found. The BBS community, arguably due to prompting from Katz, took the suit as an example of a large, faceless corporation crushing the little-guy — even though both companies were family businesses with fewer than 5 or so people. SEA's founder, Thom Henderson, has said that users who spoke to him at the time "didn't care" if PKARC misappropriated his copyrights and trademark; they just wanted to use the fastest software to compress and uncompress files.[2]
PKZIP
Katz quickly replaced PKARC with PKPAK, and soon after that, with the new and completely re-written PKZIP. Released as shareware, PKZIP compressed both better and faster than ARC. Katz kept the new ZIP file format open. As a result, it soon became a standard for file compression across many platforms. PKZIP made Katz one of the most well known shareware authors of all time. Although his company PKWARE became a multimillion dollar company, Katz was more noted for his technical expertise than expertise in running a company. His family assisted him in running the company, but he eventually fired them when they denied him access to the company's profits.[3] Katz was adamantly opposed to Microsoft Windows in the early 90s. This led to PKWARE missing out on the opportunity to be the first to bring PKZIP to the platform.
Death
Katz led a very troubled personal life and battled alcoholism for years. Attempts to help him proved fruitless, and it is reported that he died with no friends remaining. He was arrested several times for driving under the influence, and became known for spending more time in cheap motels and strip clubs than his own home. [4] Katz was found dead in a hotel room with an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps in his hand on April 14, 2000 at the age of 37. A coroner's report stated his death was a result of acute pancreatic bleeding caused by chronic alcoholism. [1]
References
- ^ "Famed software pioneer dies at 37", Journal Sentinel, April 22, 2000. Retrieved on 2007-05-14. "Phillip W. Katz, the eccentric inventor of computer file-compression software used around the world, and a pioneer in the concept of shareware, is dead at age 37. The cause of death was complications from chronic alcoholism, according to medical examiner's records. Katz came onto the computer scene when communication was expensive and slow. His program, PKZip, played a large role in making Internet communication faster, said a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee computer science"
