Phillip W. Katz, Creator Of PKZIP, Dead At 37

Danborg writes "ABCNEWS has the story. Evidently Mr. Katz died of complications from chronic alcoholism. A sad end to a true pioneer in the field of data compression. Who doesn't remember converting all their files to .zip format back in the BBS days?" The fact of his death has been out for awhile, but its circumstances only came to our attention yesterday (through *many* submissions). Genius and tragedy are too often linked.

Wrong Katz!

I just read "Katz" and "dead" and got all excited.

Then it turned out it was somebody cool.

Darn.

Would like to know the rest of the story

Judging by success of ZIP clones like WinZip, seemed like PKWare fell behind and was no longer profiting from its algorithm. I'm sadly curious to know the rest of the story ... was the company failing, did that drive him to drink? :(


...................

Ahh the good ole days!

Is anyone else with me when I say that I STILL USE command line pkzip?? I am so used to typing pkunzip file.zip -d!

I am proud to say that I have NEVER EVER installed WinZIP on my computer! I tried using it on someone else's computer a while ago, and all those buttons got in the way. I still have my original PK204GRG.EXE file from five years ago. It is ALWAYS extracted in my \windows\command directory. Unfortunately, tho, it couldn't handle long file names... PKZIP 2.5 COMMAND LINE to the rescue!!! But, since I am so used to pkunzip.exe, I made myself a pkunzip.bat file that says: "pkzip25 -extract -dir %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9"

PKware will never die! :) :)

Re:bummer

Amen. Its quite tragic that someone who gave something that became so integral to the industry is still going to be a relatively obscure death. I mean, I can think of a lot of actors who's deaths have made more waves then this, and yet what importance were they, really? I mean, I know pkzip isn't like the holy grail of technology or anything, but still, even windozers know what zip is.

If Lord Linus died tomorrow, who would care but us? Meanwhile, David Hasselhoff would make front page. What a media-obsessed culture.

Gone are the days...

Oh, the memories...

I used to go down to the local computer store, which had bins and bins of the latest shareware, all on precious 5 1/4 disks. Each one held some sort of magic that would transform my XT with Hercules graphics into a completely absorbing experience.

Video games, clones of major applications, dinky little Pascal compilers, my first version of Spacewar....

But there was a key to all of that magic. Back then, there were no auto-installing CDs. There was no "setup.exe" There would just be a single file, with that ever-familiar extension: ".ZIP"

I had been on the scene long enough to know what was up, so I not only had PKZIP/PKUNZIP installed on my 4 meg harddrive, but I even had it in the PATH.

A few keystrokes later, the magic was unlocked.

We don't know how much we owe to this great man. I genuinely mourn his passing.

37

So many celebrities, poets, actors, revolutionaries, wariers, politicians etc have died on 33 and 37, I tell you, if you pass 37 you'll probably live a long life.

(to those of us who remember Vladimir Visotskiy) Na zifre 37, kovaren bog, rebrom vopros postavil: ili, ili
Na etom rubeje legli i Bairon i Rembo a nineshnie kak-to proskochili...

So does anyone know anything more about him

I had a quick search, and couldn't find anything on the net about Katz. I was wondering if there's anything to indicate why. Did he have a wife? Did he get along with his family. He was a reasonably successful man, reading the article, and one would think there'd be some reason for him to drink himself to death.

And hooray for PKZip. One assumes compression for the masses would have arrived soon, but I don't think computing would have been quite the same without PKZip.

tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose

*sigh*

This is the first I've heard of his death and I have to say that it really makes me feel sad. I'm not aware of much that he's done outside of PKZIP, but I sure remember using ZIP for everything online (especially when a 2400 baud modem was considered fast and a zipped file could half your online time).

Huffman, Postel, Stevens . . . Now P.W. Katz. I feel guilty for not ever considering any of these people beyond what their program does or does not do for me -- or how I benefitted from their books, until after their death. To think that while we're all out there unzipping our latest copy of the Jargon file or stashing a bunch of porn in a password protected ZIP file, this guy was suffering a serious problem which eventually took his life at the age of *thirty-seven*.

I'm only 22. I spend all my time working at a desk. I haven't been in-shape for almost six years. I could be next. I could be next and I haven't offered a damn thing to the computer or internet community. These people -- and many others, have.

I hope that we'll remember these things in subsequent posts in reply to this article. The last thing we need is another disgustingly barbaric replay of the posts we saw when W. Richard Stevens died.

I hope you have peace, Phillip.

W. Richard Stevens Slashdot Article [slashdot.org]
W. Richard Stevens Home Page [kohala.com]
David Huffman Slashdot Article [slashdot.org]
Jon Postel Slashdot Article [slashdot.org]
Jon Postel's Home Page [isi.edu]

---
icq:2057699
seumas.com

Fame, Fortune and Obscurity

Every hear the song "Closet Chronicles" by Kansas? Our society values us by what we "contribute", how attractive we are... Many things which are meaningless in the end. If we live long enough to decay, if we cease to "contribute" then we are forgotten.

We all come into this world precious, priceless.

We leave it the same way. None of us has any more value, no one has any less.

I have used the fruit of Phil's labor for many years, and I am greatful for his hard work.

My symapthies to his family and friends.

Tom

JKZip

JKZip, AKA Jon Katz Zip

Features:

- Compression methods to suppress massive ammounts of text and binaries of anti Jon Katz propaganda.

- Can create self extractable exe's that include past articles written by Jon Katz as the data is decompressed.

JKZip is available online as shareware. Everytime you run JKZip, an notice will appear that you have no registered and will be forced to read a Jon Katz article. If you wish to register JKZip, the cost is easily done by 4 easy payments of $19.95. If you order now, you'll get a free copy of Voices from the Hellmouth.

Re:Wrong Katz!

That is really tasteless. You may not like the Jon Katz who writes/posts for slashdot, but to get excited over his possible death is horrible. Regardless of what you think of this writing, he is still another human. I don't understand why this comment was moderated up. Death is not funny, it's sad. To enjoy the death of another is simply wrong.

What a waste..

According to the article, this guy lived in a luxury condo filled waist-high with rotting food and garbage, infested with insects and mice..Found dead in a hotel room with 5 empty bottles of booze at the age of 37.

An absolute and total waste. It just makes me wonder why he was trying to drown his sorrows.. For a guy with that much success in life, and for someone who actually managed to do something halfway important, why he'd slowly kill himself.

Genius isnt linked with tragedy. Genius is linked with madness.



Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda [unc.edu])

Re:PK vs. SEA controversy

O.K., here is the story as I remember it.

Phil wrote a better compression program that was compatible with System Enhancements Associates (SEA) program called ARC. So they litigated. And so Phil went off and found a better algorithem for compression, and brought out PKZIP.Many people in the BBS community thought that SEA was a little heavyhanded (Perception, I don't know the reality), and moved to PKZIP. Others moved over for the speed and the better compression. The rest is history.

See also "arc wars" [cs.hut.fi]MIT Jargon File ver 299. This story seems to have been dropped from the current Jargon File [jargon.org] for some reason.

ttyl
Farrell McGovern
Former Sysop, Data/SFnet (One of the first few hundred Fidonet BBSs!) and Solsbury Hill, founding member of PODSnet.

This is really sad!

I definitely remember Phil Katz and all the controversy surrounding him, and how grateful I was to have discovered his programs. I remember the first compression program which was SEA's ARC program. It was very slow. Then my friend and I discovered PKARC and PKXARC, which were much faster than ARC. As PKARC gained popularity because of its overall superiority, SEA sued Phil Katz, and he in turn created PKPAK/PKUNPAK (I think it was still paired like that). Tha PKPAK series didn't last long. The PKZIP series came out next, and that was the series that created the ubiquitous ZIP format that we see today. If I remember correctly, PKZ204G was the last official DOS version of the program, and there were plenty of trojans, etc. that were going around, and Phil created self-authenticating zip files, etc. Lots of neat little cool things. I also remember that other programs were giving PK a run for his money, such as ARJ and LHARC, but they never achieved the overall speed/performance/compression that PKZIP ever did (they were often better in one thing or another but not overall). Then WINZIP came out, and I kind lost sight of PK.

I still have thousands of ZIP files that were zipped with PKZIP. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have been as into computers as I am, it was because of those early days of playing around with PKARC and PKXARC that really got me started. I am terribly sad to see him go and in such (I think) indignant way.

Re:Would like to know the rest of the story

Well, PKZip seems to have stopped development around 1993, well before WinZip became popular. PKZIp v2.04g was pretty much the last version I know of, and it came out february 1, 1993. Up until then there had been fairly frequent updates, but throughout 1993, 1994, and 1995, PKZIp v2.04g for DOS remained the standard compression tool. Only then, after 2-3 years of no updates, did other tools like WinZip become popular. PKZIp finally made a Windows product in 1997 or 1998, but they were long gone by then. I'm not sure what led to the development halt, but the original stuff is fine coding...

Re:Would like to know the rest of the story

IIRC, the ZIP file format was made public domain, thus allowing the Info-ZIP people to write a program that reads ZIP archives, which in turn allowed WinZip to not have to license software from PKware.

Unlike LZW, the ZIP "deflate" algorithms (LZ77 + Shannon Fano encoding) are unemcumbered. These compression algorithms are used in GNU Zip (gzip) partly for that reason. I think gzip can even read .zip archives with only one file inside. The zip algorithm is also in the zlib library, which is used in the PNG format, for one. The "deflate" algorithm is also described in RFC 1951.

So, thanks PK, for providing one of the tools that enable us to thumb our noses at Unisys :-)

Reason to live? Reason to die?

Alcoholism is not as simple as it would appear to be... Alcoholism is a depressant and logically goes hand in hand with depression. When abused, alcohol can lead to a downward spiral which is hard to comprehend.

One of my best friends is a recently recovered alcoholic. He used to down a bottle of hard liquor every night, often chased with some other nastiness. Finally, I got him to slow down, and just drink socially and he got out of a three year depression and thanks me far far far too much for helping him quit the alcohol abuse.

The trouble is that you drink to stop feeling like shit, but the drink causes you to feel like shit later... so you drink more and.... well, it's just sad.

(now some wannabe troll will just post a rude folowup that isn't even funny)
----------------------------

Re:JKZip

Yes, I've heard of that format as well. I believe that no matter how large the content, it can be compressed into the following sentence:

"Geeks are oppressed. Down with corporate America! Hey, what about those Sex Bots?"

Very tight algorhythm, indeed.

- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

Re:PK vs. SEA controversy

Phil wrote a better compression program that was compatible with System Enhancements Associates (SEA) program called ARC

IIRC, Phil essentially wrote an assembler workalike of ARC, called PKArc. Naturally, it was faster.

So they litigated.

And they settled. My memory of the settlement is that Phil agreed to immediately change the name of his product to PKPAK, and to within a few months create a different product(which ended up being PKZIP). The rest of the settlement was secret(speculation in the BBS community seemed to be that it was SEA that wanted the secrecy. I later found a transcript of a thread on this subject on Bix where Thom Henderson(one of the founders of SEA) indicated it was PKWare that asked for it).

Many people in the BBS community thought that SEA was a little heavyhanded (Perception, I don't know the reality) and moved to PKZIP.

The suit basically had 3 claims:

1. Copyright infringement. There may have been something to this, as there were indications that there were comment typos in the SEA source that also showed up in the PKware source.
2. Usage of SEA's proprietary ARC file format.
3. Usage of SEA's proprietary .ARC extension

The latter two claims stuck in the craw of many in the BBS community(particularly the last one), and added a lot to the perception of SEA as a legal bully. As a result, many in the BBS community were quite eager to switch over as soon as PKZip became stable, and plenty of BBSs converted en mass shortly thereafter.

I've since come to regard this situation as a good example of the danger of pursuing a lawsuit with "legal blinders'(seeing things only from the perspective of the law) on, particularly when your market has access to large-scale communications. Ignoring the likely perceptions of your market may very well result in you winning the lawsuit, but losing the market. ARC very quickly went from the defacto standard archiving utility for the BBS and online service community to an also ran, largely as a result of the BBS community's perceptions of the suit.

Philip's remains.

Does anybody else think it would be morbidly humorous if he were cremated, and then stuffed into a really tiny urn?

www.pkware.com says nothing about it.

Don't you find it strange? Could this have anything to do with the circumstances of his death?


----

Re:Still on his county's 'most wanted' list though

Alcoholism is no laughing matter. It is sad that someone so young and who had contributed so much could have died in such a horrible manner. It is reminiscent of Leaving Las vegas, where the main charachter drinks himself to death. That movie scared me. It still scares me. I am an alcoholic in recovery and have been sober since September 1996. I wish Mr. Katz could have benefitted from being introduced to some recovery program like AA or if he was, that he could have stayed. Ten percent of all people are alcoholics and only 10% of them ever recover for any significant amount of time. There is hope for others though. My friend recently celebrated 25 years sober. May Mr. Katz finally find some peace.

A look at his personal life

Not a troll. Take a look over here:

http://www.co.ozaukee.wi.us/Sheriff/MostWanted.h tm#K

Spare me

I really don't think its possible to mourn the passing of a complete stranger and be respectful or sincere. Is this the princess Diana for the geek set? Really, give it up you're mourning software, not a real person. You're going to get teary eyed because he wrote a program that let you compress a password protected French Postcards onto one 5.25 disk?

I can't think of a worse legacy than having a bunch of people feel sorry for you not because of any of your personal qualities but because of some program you wrote in the 80s. Its a shame anyone has to die, but have some respect for yourself and dead and don't pretend that you're really sadened and feel a loss.

Re:What a waste..

Tragedy is an important component of being genious.

It may be common for tragedy and genius to be linked, but it sure isn't an absolute requirement. I give as a counterexample J.S. Bach, who according to all the information we have, was a very happy man with a good family life (and what a family!) More unhappy geniuses to look to this man as an example.

Also, consider that misery is hardly limited to the intellectually endowed. It's just that, with genius, it hurts you more and you are more able to communicate your hurt to others.
--

Re:Philip Katz Dead?

This item got submitted at least 100 times. I selected a submission at random after eliminating the ones with obvious bad links or major spelling/grammatical errors.

"Danborg" is not a friend -- or an enemy. I don't know him/her/it at all. He/she/it simply had one of the earlier, more coherent submissions.

When an item is submitted to Slashdot more than 100 times, by definition at least 99% of the submissions will be rejected, many of which are probably just as good as the selected one.

- Robin

Re:Reason to live? Reason to die?

Well, I don't think I'm a troll, but anyway.

I have to tell you that your friend will most likely return to alcohol.

I base this on two things: one your use of the word "recovered" and two the fact that he still drinks "socially". In my experience (I actually have a fair amount) anyone who thinks he's finally kicked an addiction is kidding himself. For my addictions, I live with the knowledge, each day, that I am still an addict (in my case smoking, but I've helped people with much more serious addictions), and could return at any point.

The second sad fact is that most addicts, if they partake of the substance they are addicted to even once will eventually return. There has to be a hard line between on the wagon and off the wagon. If your friend continues to drink socially, they will most likely fall off the wagon -- it's only a matter of time.

The statistics are frightening: something like 95% of all addicts return to disfunctional patterns on partaking of the substance just once.

My advice would be to try to get your friend to participate in a 12 step program of some kind. AA is very good, and very successful. Remember: the research indicates that there is simply no such thing as a "recovered alcoholic".

I hope that wasn't a troll.

--

There Are Many Kinds Of Drinking Problems...

I think society today shoves all people with drinking problems into one group, and labels them all alcoholics.

My first year and a half in college, I fit the description of an alcoholic as used today. Couple bottles of Beam a week, plus whatever else, I was a mess. Still got decent grades, though...

Then I realized that I was pushing the envelope way too hard, and backed off. That was all it took for me. I continued to drink, but it doesn't cause me the problems it used to.

I think it comes down to where the addiction gets you- in the head, or in the body. I slowed down a lot and didn't miss being "Drinky the Drunk Guy" one bit, and haven't ever since then. But I don't doubt that there are many people physically addicted, and for them cold turkey may really be the only viable choice.

-cwk.