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Information about Phil Katz

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Phil Katz, shown in 1994, holds a computer disk containing compression software made by his company, PKWare Inc.
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.

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 like wildfire 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 apropriation 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, which 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 hired people he trusted to run the company and continued writing software himself.

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 battled alcoholism for years. His friends tried to help him with his addiction, but they were rebuffed, and he gradually shut them out completely. He was arrested several times for driving under the influence, and later in his life, spent more time in cheap motels and strip clubs than his own home.[3]

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

1. ^ "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 science2000"> 

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programmer or software developer is someone who programs computers, that is, one who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.
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PKZIP is an archiving tool originally written by the late Phil Katz, and marketed by his company PKWARE, Inc. PKZIP is an acronym for Phil Katz's ZIP program.

The first version of PKZIP appeared in 1989.
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data compression or source coding is the process of encoding information using fewer bits (or other information-bearing units) than an un-encoded representation would use through use of specific encoding schemes.
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personal computer (PC) is a computer whose original sales price, size, and capabilities make it useful for individuals.

It is unknown who coined the phrase with the intent of a small affordable computing device but John W.
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An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer. An operating system processes system data and user input, and responds by allocating and managing tasks and internal system resources as a service to users and programs of the
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DOS (from Disk Operating System) commonly refers to the family of closely related operating systems which dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995 (or until about 2000, if Windows 9x systems are included): DR-DOS, FreeDOS, MS-DOS, Novell-DOS, OpenDOS, PC-DOS,
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Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems.
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University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (also known as UW-Milwaukee, UWM or Milwaukee) is a public research university located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As Wisconsin's urban university, UW-Milwaukee is one of the two doctoral public research institutions and the
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BBS may refer to:
  • Bulletin board system, a computer that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line
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assembly language is a low-level language for programming computers. It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture.
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In computing, optimization is the process of modifying a system to make some aspect of it work more efficiently or use fewer resources. For instance, a computer program may be optimized so that it executes more rapidly, or is capable of operating within a reduced amount of memory
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Bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line (or Telnet) and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, uploading data, reading news, and exchanging
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PKZIP is an archiving tool originally written by the late Phil Katz, and marketed by his company PKWARE, Inc. PKZIP is an acronym for Phil Katz's ZIP program.

The first version of PKZIP appeared in 1989.
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Shareware is a marketing method for computer software. Shareware software is typically obtained free of charge, often by downloading from the Internet or on magazine cover-disks. A user tries out the program, and thus shareware has also been known as "try before you buy".
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ZIP

A zip archive icon from the Nuvola icon set.
File extension: .zip
MIME type: application/zip
Uniform Type Identifier: com.pkware.
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An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it.

The terms "open" and "standard" have a wide range of meanings associated with their usage.
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Microsoft Windows

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Alcoholism is a term with multiple and sometimes conflicting definitions. In common and historic usage, alcoholism refers to any condition that results in the continued consumption of alcoholic beverages despite the
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Acute pancreatitis
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Pancreas
ICD-10 K 85.
ICD-9 577.0

DiseasesDB 9539
MedlinePlus 000287
eMedicine med/1720   radio/521

Acute pancreatitis is rapidly-onset inflammation of the pancreas.
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