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.

1 Early life
2 PKZIP
3 Death
4 External links

[edit] Early life

He 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, which was distributed along with the source code, was written in C. 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, and then to make his software shareware.

However, 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. Katz withdrew PKARC from the market, and instead released PKPAK, which was similar in all but name. 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]

This whole debacle was extremely controversial, and Katz's version of the story in his own words will forever remain unknown.

[edit] PKZIP

Katz soon replaced PKPAK 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 anti-Windows in the early 90's. This led to PKWARE missing out on the opportunity to be the first to bring PKZIP to the platform.

[edit] 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 pancreatitis bleeding caused by chronic alcoholism.