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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.
I just read "Katz" and "dead" and got all excited.
Then it turned out it was somebody cool.
Darn.
I still use pkzip and pkunzip over winzip, his death is very tragic :(
I have based many open source projects on libraries implementing his format.
It always sucks to lose a true hacker.
Peace.
Blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
To his family and those close to him,.. untimely death is always terribly unfortunate whether is someone we all know or someone you have never heard of....
Subject says it all.
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? :(
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I seem to recall there was a bit of a row over control the ARC and PAK file formats that led to the creation of PKZIP.
That's truly saddening, to know that someone so ... hmm, important, really, should die at such a tragic end. And so YOUNG! 37 is hardly old enough to even say that he lived a good life. No one's ever old enough to die, but some are simply younger than others.
My condolences go out to his family, his friends, everyone that ever used the wonderful software, and in fact the world in general. It's sad to mourn the passing of anyone who pioneers anything, but sadder still when that very pioneer dies young.
We each give up something in exchange for fame, if we want it, and that's something that he, clearly, gave up: A long life. We'll be the lesser without him.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
"On that train all graphite and glitter, undersea by rail. Ninety minutes from New York to Paris..." -Donald Fagen, IGY
Since I used pkunzip to extract doom, that makes it the first program I ever used. It was a regular partner back in the days of DOS games.
Thanks, Phillip.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
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!
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.
Reminds me of the story of Alan Turing's life. Strange how grreat thinkers often have so much trouble managing their lives. I wonder sometimes if ignorance really is bliss. Either way, hats off to a true trailblazer.
Ps. Wonder if we could get the reply form to function like vi?
Cheers,
Craig
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.
Got Rhinos?
---
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...
You can't handle the truth.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
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
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
When I do use zip (I usually use RAR) I use winzip, but it's still important to note that whatever unzipper or zipper you use it still has that great man's code in it, and you can bet that when Linus dies (hopefully not for many many years), or even Bill Gates (Don't flame me) there will be a much larger mourning amoung the worlwide community, but most peoples work is most often not appriciated until a few (sometimes hundreds of) years after they have died.
So,
Phillip W. Katz,
R.I.P.
From the open source community.
-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-
Laptop006 (RHCE: That means I know what I'm talking about!)
Melbourne, Australia
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
Brings back fond memories of my youth, wasting away in front of the DOS command prompt. I still remember my first BBS download, EGATrek.zip. From the moment my eyes spotted the games file board, I was an addict. Took me awhile to figure out the differences between X, Y and Z modem, but I got the damn thing downloaded. Of course it took me another couple of hours before I figured out what a ZIP file was and how to deal with it. Luckily, the old hands were kind enough to show a punk kid the ropes. I felt so indebted that eventually I had to give something back in return. I started my own BBS. :)
I must say PKZIP was one of the most reliable programs I've ever used. I don't recall it ever segfaulting, or losing any of my compressed data. It even ran quickly on my 386.
PKZIP 2.04G will probably always have a reserved place on my hard drives, even now that I've moved to Linux.
As an aside, anyone out there from Fidonet 4:920? I was the SysOP of the Razor's Edge BBS back in the day (4:920/35).
The more you know, the less you understand.
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
W. Richard Stevens Home Page
David Huffman Slashdot Article
Jon Postel Slashdot Article
Jon Postel's Home Page
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
"In early days, compression was all done with software because there was no hardware to do this stuff," said computer science professor Leonard Levine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "So Katz put together a program called PKZip, the Phil Katz zip program."
"Early days" is of course in contrast to modern times, now that we all have Winzip PCI cards doing "hardware" compression. Or did the esteemed professor perhaps mean that PKZip was actually hardware? Either way...
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, 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.
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Check out my blackbox styles
37
RIP
You can't handle the truth.
i didn't either.
do you think it would be appropriate to register
now, and contribute the check to his estate?
There's a quick mention on the Dr. Dobb's Journal webpage here.
:-)
That's where I first heard about it.
I remember well the first time I encountered pkzip.
I was so amazed at how much smaller it could make things than arc.
I remember feeling vaguly disappointed when, being over optimistic in the power of that mighty software I tried re-zipping a file over and over trying to get it down to fit on a 360 k disk
I was still impressed even after I failed.
It was rather shocking to hear of his death.
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)
Bowie J. Poag
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.
If Lord Linus died tomorrow, who would care but us? Meanwhile, David Hasselhoff would make front page. What a media-obsessed culture.
Oh come on. I could say the opposite for all the linux hype on slashdot.
"If Lord David Hasselhoff died tomorrow, who would care but us?. Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds would make one HUGE Slashdot article. What an http obsessed geek culture."
I still have the bound manual they mailed me. In fact, it's on the shelf not two feet from me.
Damn. Poor bastard.
Remember folks; money and success aren't everything. They can give security and pretty distractions, but they can't fill an empty void in your soul. You've got to be connected with people, and find some meaning in your life.
Take are of yourselves!
My first programming job was working on a windows based zip application. For those that asked about paying royalties for the use of the format, the answer is no the other companies do not. Katz developed ZIP files as a published standard. A beautiful standard that he revised with new versions of his compression software. As I worked on my project the 2.04g standard was my guideline. It continues to be my standard for quality technical documentation.
One of my assignments was writing the self extraction engine. I never did figure out how
he made his so small. The rumour at my company was that he hand tweaked the assembler code with every trick in the book.
I posted this last night and it got rejected? hmmmmm
"I don't code the things you use, I make the code your things use better."®
which yields this--
Friday, October 22, 1999 ...
...Deaths Elsewhere
Stanley Dritz, 88, zipper inventor
NEW YORK -- Stanley L. Dritz, who popularized the zipper and other sewing products as part of his family's business, died Saturday in White Plains, N.Y. He was 88.
As president of John Dritz & Sons, Dritz raised the consumer appeal of a hookless fastener he had first seen in England. He made the fastener, commonly known as the zipper, out of plastic and rustproof metals.
It was one of the hundreds of sewing aids found in his company's catalog, which also included the seam ripper and the electric scissors.
Dritz was born in New York City and joined his father's business after graduating from college. He was president in the 1950s and 1960s, and the company was sold upon his retirement.
taken from
Citrus County Chronicle
1624 N. Meadowcrest Blvd.
Crystal River, FL 34429
I don't know if the poster of the above is clueless or trying to be funny, but I've used both gentlemen's products and in both cases would have been at a serious disadvantge without them.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Um, yeah, if you use Windows...most of the files I download end in .sit, .sea, .bin, .hqx, and occasionally .cpt, thanks to Raymond Lau and Bill Goodman (who wrote the original Stuffit and Compactor/Compact Pro, respectively). I bet most /.ers' downloads end in .z, .bz, or .tar, and not .zip.
Still, it sucks that he is dead. More evidence of the damage alcohol abuse can inflict on a person. What a shame.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
The original obituary notice
A more complete article
One interesting quote:
"It was just a hobby," he said. "I didn't expect it to turn into a business."
I had a moderately successful shareware program myself during the '80s, and it sure didn't help my life much. Fortunately I have no interest in booze or drugs -- they just get in the way of hacking. And also fortunately, I let it go when it wasn't successful any more. Maybe a little later than I should have, but I did move on.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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)
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Couldn't find much so far about him but I came across this page where several patents on data compression algorithms are mentioned and this led me to one of his patents , a so-called string searcher and compressor.
It would be interesting to know if what the patent decribes is the technology behind PKZIP.
I first found out about this on CNET Download.com's front page; there was this little message in memoriam of PK but I don't think it was mentioned on News.com; that was strange. This is a sad event and I think it would be more convenient and respectful if we didn't get to know the details of his death just because it turned out to be a morbid and attention-attracting story for the media.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
I find that remark in extremely bad taste, so watch out when *I* meet *you*, because you now have a lesson in manners coming.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
I recently helped a family member pick out a new computer and promptly reclaimed my old 286 that I had loaned to them. I of course had to hook it up and tinker around. Qmodem is still installed and all my old BBS files are on there. I can vividly remember the excitement of unzipping the latest dl's from various BBS's. I hope that Katz had some idea as to the enjoyment and usefulness that his software provided to a geek such as myself. -Atlas
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"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."
Someone ought to tell his county sheriff that he's an easy catch now. Alternatively, maybe residents of Ozaukee County, Wisconsin should be worried.
/. karma but often a small effort is all it takes.
Seriously though, I'm the same age, and I've seen so many of my 1962 cohort die over the years that I don't even have the words anymore. Med students driving home after a long night on-call; a 16-year-old early admission BA/JD student in a 'freak' amusement park accident, enjoying her final weeks before she left for college; more than one suicide...
A lot of talent and promise gone. A lot of suffering we couldn't heal.
I hope I don't sound hokey if I urge you... if you have a friend who drinks too much, or who seems depressed... please find out what you can do to help. There may not be much you can do, and it may not add to your
On his his DWI rap sheet alone, The warning signs were clear. I hope someone at least tried to help.
Requiescat In Pace, Phillip Walter Katz
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
PKZip is truly a meaningful contribution.
Think of this, did you ever see it crash?
Truly a sad tale.
"Hey... don't be mean." --Buckaroo Banzai
Seriously though, the powers of command-line vs. GUI still apply with pkzip vs. winzip. If I want to extract 100 zip files to the same directory.. one simple command. Same for vice-versa... what's all this drag-n-drop crap? ;)
One thing that kinda gets me.. how exactly is WinZip related to this? That is.. is it just a wrapper to pkunzip or is it actually a modified compression algorithm or what? If you'll recall, there actually was an 'official' PKZip for windows (though I do not know what the actual name of it was). Terrible interface though.. shame..
Katz will be missed, as many have said here before, his programs most likely changed the way we do computing today.
I remember back when I refused to go away from my PKPAK/PKUNPAK ARC compression to this new fangled ZIP format...For some reason I was an ARC loyalist...Heh.
:>
I wizened up, obviously.
When I make ZIP files, I STILL go to the command line and use PKZIP...And if there are no long filenames, I still use PKUNZIP today to unzip things. Yeah, it doesn't save the case, but who cares.
Rest in peace, PK.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Converting all my files to .zip format, because back when pkzip was da bomb on PCs, I had an Amiga (hell, I still have all my old Amigas). What I do remember, is racing compression programs and benchmarking compression rations between the iterations of LHA and PKZIP in order to get bragging rights in the teenage geek arguments of "my computer is better than yours". So I may not have used PKZIP, but it gave me hours of fun, anyway.
That's kind of sad 8)
But not as sad as someone talented drinking themselves to death at 37. Condolences to Katzs' family and friends.
"Genius and tragedy are too often linked."
Ahem.
*Anything* and tragedy are too often linked.
Linus Torvalds is big enought that the computer magazines would say something, too.
Abusing your body or not, death still sucks. Show a little respect, sure it was his own fault, but that doesn't mean that his death doesn't matter.
Heheh, it has its own cushy little directory in C:\Dos\PKWare on my computer, which is (of course) on the path. But yeah, I also use Winzip. Funny story: I'm not a good programmer, I make crappy Visual Basic games, and I run windoze. I couldn't find code I could understand for a compressions system, and a game I was working on had 150+ .bmp files. So, I rigged a shell call of PKunzjr.com into the form.load so that it would decompress a .zip file before running, in DOS command line. Problem is that if I ran it hidden, I couldn't figure out how to close the process. So, I kept leaving these little "Pkunzjr - Finished" windows open every time I ran the game. It was so cool. Katz will be missed.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Does anybody else think it would be morbidly humorous if he were cremated, and then stuffed into a really tiny urn?
Don't you find it strange? Could this have anything to do with the circumstances of his death?
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I guess if you're brilliant and accomplish something special, you better kill yourself or you will never be appreciated/understood.
how sad.
B
So many celebrities, poets, actors, revolutionaries, wariers, politicians etc have died on 33 and 37.
That'd be a pretty neat trick and all, but unless they've mastered reincarnation where you're from, I'd be pretty stunned to have heard of someone dying at 33 and 37. :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Yeah, okay, so it was just a trojan horse, so sue me. :P
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
It was posted on http://download.cnet.com/ during that day. Shoot, I even submitted about it to /. but it got declined. Hmmph.
I remember the days when pkware came out of BBS' and I went crazy to download it! Remember with all the bugs, and then 2.04g (MS-DOS) finally came out? After many years until last year, v2.50 came out (wow).
[sniffs]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Not a troll. Take a look over here:
h tm#K
http://www.co.ozaukee.wi.us/Sheriff/MostWanted.
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.
Attention Hackers If (((you are knee deep in trash) and (rotting food)) or (if you see three or more bottles of liquor on the floor))) { getHelp(); } Learn from this hacker, and be careful. We need all the good hackers we can get. PKZip was great. The reason it is so dominant today (even with self-installing exe) is that he made it OPEN. But, I regretfully note, the world didn't seem to reward him for his contribution.
As antdude mentioned earlier, some versions of PKZip were indeed buggy, and some of these bugs lead to crashes or (being a DOS program) system lockups.
Here is the version history as I recall it.
v1.0 and v1.1 - Initial versions, stable, but didn't compress that much better than ARC.
Then nothing for a great while. BBS users were expecting PK to come up with a quantum leap, PKZIP version 2. They were waiting the way some people were waiting for DOOM version 1.
Flash forward to 1993.
v2.04c - truly dreadful, showstopping bugs. Mostly due to interactions with flaky extended/expanded memory access code.
v2.04e - most of these bugs fixed.
v2.04g - perfection!
Lansdowne
Hum. What about .bz ? Bzip makes use of the Burrows-Wheeler transform on blocks of data which are then are then compressed using more standard methods such as Huffman, Run Length Encoding and Arithmethic encoding.
The resulting alogrithm compresses much better than LZ77 + Shannon. It is so good that almost ever kernel image in the linux world is a bzImage.
Katz should be praised for his work but the world of compression has moved on and zip is no longer state of the art.
-dp
It has a lot more options and better to use if
you need to spand over several discs a big program.
If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong. - Schryer
It proves that even fortunate people screw up. Shame on you Phil Katz. There are poor people who would have given everything to be 1/10th of where you were.
I watched as EVERYONE I knew used PKZip every day, day after day, year after year, and no one ever considered paying, not personal users, and not corporate users.
As a point of honor, I finally did register, years after I should have. It felt good.
He just compressed a full lifetime into 37 years. Actually not a very impressive compression ratio. He should have been dead years ago.
By the time he died, Phillip Katz's brain was so pickled that he didn't remember pkzip either.
The same thought occured to me. However, a quick visit to www.pkware.com presented me with the question of whether or not Katz actually owned PKWare at the time of his death or not.
Perhaps there is a memorial fund all of us non-registered users can contribute to in recognition of the convienience he provided us.
Rest in peace, Phil Katz.
Just to tell you that bzImage for the Linux kernel is NOT the bzip2 compression that you know. The Linux kernel compression is still gzip. bzImage is just a format for very big kernels.
Let's see -- you believe you can control a chemical in your body and what it does to you.
If cynicism is a disease, you appear to have it....
Meaning no disrespect for the dead, but history deserves to be correct. The real story is that before PKZIP, PKWare had a product called PKARC and it is very likely that large portions of the source in PKARC were stolen from SEA's ARC program. When SEA sued Phil Katz, he settled and as part of the settlement had to stop using "ARC" in his products so he released an interim PKPAK. I used all three programs, and while PKARC was definitely much faster than ARC (which was pretty important on my 8088), the evidence reported in the press was very convincing.
Only after the lawsuit did he start thinking about PKZIP, he did not invent the LZ77 algorithm used by PKZIP as some other posts have claimed, and I rather doubt he is anything like the pioneer or genius he is made out to be.
As for WinZip, they very likely got their start by using the Info-Zip code, without attribution, as the basis for their GUI front-end. I believe PKWare was still pushing their DOS file manager thing, but I don't remember what it was called.
One other point that the article get's wrong is that PKZIP was never free in the early days, but shareware with a $49 registration.
One can still find source code for a version of ARC, and it compiles under my Linux installation.
--
So many "first post" idjits...so few moderator points...
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
PKZip was shareware and NO ONE ever paid for it. Maybe he was a dismissal financial failure and paid for it with his life. That's too bad. If only he used the GPL.
I remember way back when pkzip 2.04g came out. That was like the big defining version of DOS based zip compression.
All the cool bbss were requiring zip back then, although some people tried to argue that arj and ace were better.
In the long run Winzip seems to have made zip the predominate form of compression in the Windows world, although the folks that really know what they are doing switched to rar compression long ago.
I still remember zipping up Doom II to back it up onto floppies 3 months before it was released when some janitor at id leaked it. Man, zip was SO great in those days.
Maybe someone should write a comment into the Linux kernel in memoriam or something.
Anyway....
Stupid racist fuck.
A great man dies and you decide to blame black and Jewish people?
Alcoholism is a disease that needs treatment and help.
You don't mention all the white people also lined up outside those same pawn shops, liquer stores and check cashing joints.
You disgust me.
Neurotic: Person who builds forts in the sky
Psychotic: Person who lives in those forts
I need a sig.
I personally think it would be a great way to leave this world suffering from chronic alcoholism while coding compression (or other) software in front of my computer. In fact I'd consider dying with a Beer in your hand in front of your computer a honorable death.
My guess would be that he'd been secretly suffering for many years - not unusual - and that he pushed his body too far.
It's sad that so many true hackers perish from addictions, but when you get right down to it, it's not entirely surprising, either. To be the "best" requires blind obsession, ruthless dedication, and a reckless disregard for self or others. Exactly the same ingredients that you'll find in every addict you'll ever know.
The greatest monument there could ever be to Philip Katz will not be PKZip, or some derivative, but the discovery of some way to express the genius without destroying the body enclosing it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
OK Everyone talks about PKZip - How many of you actually REGISTERED your copy? I did, and have the manuals and disks to prove it
Actually, the huffman link is here but you already figured that...
Who art thou to judge what is worthwhile and what not?
Our best answer in 2000 is (of course) both nature (genetics) and environment. Some persons brains are wired so that the sensation of intoxication is irresistibly pleasurable. They are cursed with an unfortunate gene that, in the modern world, is very maladaptive (in the ancient world perhaps this was not so). Not all these people will drink, but for many not drinking is a lifelong struggle.
Others share this prediliction, but most of the time they manage. Personal loss or social pressure can tip the balance.
I would suspect Mr. Katz shared a full dose of a bad gene (or set of genes). It is a true curse.
Of course it is not that simple. 1950s middle-class euro-americans drank a staggering amount of alcohol by our (relatively) low-consumption standards, yet neither genetics nor 'happiness' appears to have changed that greatly in the past 50 years.
Last note, contrary to the quotes in the news piece, the original PKZip was not free. It was shareware. I believe Mr. Katz's unique wisdom was to make the file format public, in contrast to the proprietary compression format it replaced (who's name is now lost to my aging memory). I have often felt we spend too much attention to code and not enough to file formats. Requiring Microsoft to use a published XML format for Word and Excel might have a greater effect on competition than requiring them to open source either application.
John Faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
You can control if you put it in you however. I would have no sympathy if someone choose to give themselves cancer and then bitched about it. Its the same way.
And don't give me crap that once you get on it you can't get off of it. My dad used to smoke, he quit cold turkey. My dad used to drink almost daily, he now only does on weekends and sparingly usually.
Saying its hard to quit is an excuse for being lazy and not trying.
Yes I will. I think that any person deserves to be respected for the good things he has done. And besides, I don't use Windows, and don't even remmember Windows too well, I haven't seen Windows for almost a year now, and I don't care about this piece of software. But, as a person, Bill made many good things. I belive that everybody should respect a person, not based on his contribution to the software world, but as for being a person. I mean, that Bill Gates deservers respect. He has achieved a lot. I'm not talking about how he achieved it, he simply was in the right place at the right time. But the fact is that he achieved.
-- Hiroshima '45... Chernobyl '86... Windows '95...
In the tradition later followed by the one-click patent and other disingenous lawsuits, SEA misused the courts to stop Phil Katz from using .ARC as a file extension. Never mind that "ARC" had been used as an abbreviation for archive for over a decade prior in mainframe systems (and was a trademark of an unrelated company, Datapoint, since the 1970's).
.ZIP the king of compressed file formats in the BBS world.
The BBS community turned up its collective nose at SEA, forcing them out of business and into obscurity, where they and the scum like them (e.g. Amazon, eToys) belong. This caused the crowning
RIP Phil Katz.
I'd like to remove my hat for a moment...
/me removes hat
...and pay respects to the man that has made my teenage years easier by allowing me to download pr0n faster and to pack it away from my parents more efficiently! You will be truely missed, and I thank you for all you have done. Rest in peace.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
Only moderators have that power :-)
And despite the implication of yerricde and others, Info-ZIP/zlib/etc. do not infringe on Katz's patent. Jean-loup spent a considerable amount of time and effort writing an algorithm that avoided all known patents, which is why everyone now uses zlib for so many things. (That's also why the patents section of the comp.compression FAQ list is so complete. But then, who bothers to read FAQs anymore?)
-- GRR: Newtware, PNG Group, AlphaWorld Map, Info-ZIP, Google cluster infrastructure,
It's only a tragedy because of what he achieved. When people die and there's no loss (except for life), it's not a tragedy. It's just death.
I still use pkzip/unzip constantly, mostly for backup under Dos/Windows (my day job :P). It's nice to work with a compression program so reliable you can use it for backup.
PKzip is, by the way, enormously faster than winzip in my experience.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Phil was wanted on 7 counts in Wisconsin. Honest. Check it out.
http://www.mcs.net/~grossman/mjnk/mj nk0696.htm
I do not know this to be the case in this instance, but a great many "actives" are self medicating depressives. This frequently goes had in hand with a degree of creativity if there is a bipolar component (as was discussed hear within recent memory). If this is someplace in your life, please recognize it and get some help. "Better living through chemistry" works a lot better these days than when the only thing available was mao inhibitors.
>> Nearly all program files downloaded from the Internet have the suffix .zip, meaning they are compressed in the format Katz developed
> Um, yeah, if you use Windows..
Windows, Dos, and Amiga and some Unix...
at one time most Unix stuff was tar/compress but Unisys changed that rather quickly..
Even the Commodore 8 bit line supported Zip...
True enough it wasn't a "fully deployed" technology...
Mac uses a diffrent system...
Commodore 8 bits prefered lnx
CP/M prefered lzh
Unix prefers B2zip and Gzip...
Fionet standardised on arc but eventually prefered pkpack over sea arc.
This isn't quite the same as all those "wonderful" software tools someone would write for Windows and say "There we have everyone covered"...
It was originally made for Dos.. WinZip is everybit a nockoff as CP/M Zip...
I don't actually exist.
People see patterns that probably arn't there.
He fell appart over the years so it seems.
This is sad... but it dose happen...
Not often enough however to consider this a real pattern...
But we do look in the clouds and see dragons.. paterns in the walls...
If we don't know better.. we can draw the wrong conclusions.
I don't actually exist.
u know u want it!
Starting on the Amiga you never got much in touch with zip, it was considered a bad format. There it was mostly LHZ, and LHA formats, which seemed much better. Not the least of which was the data recovery: If you loose ONE byte in a zip file it seems that the zip archive is just corrupted, where as LHA would extract the other files which weren't damaged.
--
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
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.
I am sorry to hear that Phil is dead. I never met him, but I've talked to several people who knew him, and they all said he was likeable guy.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
There is a medical condition in witch the liver converts Alchol into a nerotransmitter, like Morphine, or Heroin.
This affects a certan persentage of the population, and those people most certanly do become adicted to the stuff. It is a desise for those people.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Remember Clifford Stoll? ...Einsteinic hair, Cuckoo's Egg author turned luddite?
Saw the inside of his house once, it was about the same as the description of the Katz guy... incredible amounts of useless junk piled up everywhere, some places stacked as high as the ceiling..Cliff was quite at home in all of it, even entertained by the sight of it, it seemed. The woman living with him didn't seem to mind it either.
Then suddenly, Cliff goes luddite. Go figure.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Bowie J. Poag
I've had a certain soft spot for LZX for some time. Came out on the Amiga quite a while back, when LHA was pretty much it. It was fast, it compressed well. Better than PKZIP, even, as it apparently used a rather large search window.
But that seemed to be the end of it. I remember hearing that it was rather difficult to code for a DOS PC - why I don't think was explained - and Aminet was never happy to move over as they couldn't get a UNIX decompresser for it.
It strikes me as hugely unlikely that it's simply impossible to get it running under anything other than AmigaOS, but does anyone know what came of it? Seemed like a real breakthrough at the time.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Think about it.
He designed the parachute, but did he ever jump off the Leaning Tower of Pisa with one he designed and built?
Does any navy in existance sail a DaVinci class submarine?
No.
And the reason is simple.
DaVinci came up with some killer ideas in a hypothetical scientific sort of way, but the fact is that he couldn't figure out how to build them.
As to the other 3 choices well, have you ever used a phone, lightbulb, or airplane?
Exactly, me too.
I guess it just goes to prove that old saying:
Just because you paint portraits of yourself in drag; that doesn't make you an engineer.
---CONFLICT!!---
-
Alcoholism is a metabolism disorder. Like sugar.
These folks do not "have a desire", as posted here.
I was one of them, I know what I'm talking about.
The nerve system adapts quickly to alcohol, and doesn't work without it. That's the only reason why alcoholics drink. They do NOT like it.
What do you think folks back in the 70's, writing UNIX and stuff did ?
Anyone remember what "grass" ment ?
DROP THIS ASPECT !!
BTW, Death is not sad, it's normal.
Life is a sexual transmitted desease with 100% mortality.
I mean isn't that part of the big deal with it?
That would be like totally sweet.
---CONFLICT!!---
"Everyman's death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind" John Dunne
Mr Katz appears to me as a tragic man, who deserves a better obituary than that given to him wither here or in the linked article
Very humbly I offer that the very lack of detail of his life is prompting a acute sense of loss in many who post here. This lack of detail i sprompting many I think to ask questions of themselves.
Since I have a first person experience of aloholism in a variety of stages of "development" and at different times in my life, I switched to -1 reading to catch a full thread (from +1 flat) and immediately saw the unthinking and somehow predictable set of responses to a man who died through drink.
From "selfish idiot" to "sufferer of disease" (my simplifications) I have heard them all - often directed in person at me by complete strangers
I once overheard a snippet of argument from an anthropologist studying apes in the wild, which oservation was that no primate had ever been discovered alone, except dead.
One of the central tenets of protracted alcohol use, even when it is not a strict dependency or physical addiction is the alienation which results. This is so exacerbated by the reactions of people to what may be the most complex drug relation of man (booze is so pervasive in western culture we have hardly begun to think about it) that I remember myself hiding from even close friends who understood my predicament for as long as six months at a time
It is truly sad to see how alcohol afflicts so often individuals who have an idealistic approach to life. Somehow I think the false perceptions drink can give allows even the most self aware drinker a chance to reconcile deep differences between desire, perception and reality in a hazy "reality distortion field". I think for some the alcohol and the insulation from both reality per se and importantly OTHER PEOPLES conflicting realities this can provide for its users can even help maintain a sense of idealism which may be to that individual of primary importance, above any other consideration
Someone in a decidedly off - topic post mentioned Bill Joy. Since when have the creators of this world *not* been dreamers?
I think the real tragedy in a death such as Katz's is the fact that so many similar incidents pass so wholly undocumented, without ever a real explantion or even an attempt to understand what was going on.
I would not be able to offer any comment on Mr Katz at all without knowing a lot more about the man, his life and his work than I do. At least for those who are arguing that public recognition does *not* come to those who contribute freely to the world, or are not *pretty* or whatever, I CAN say that in death I should like to think the fact or circumstances would provoke someone else to really think about their own life and environment. This sort of thing does not tend to hapen in "hero worship".
Maybe someone who knows him might feel they could post something here.
To any such person I think I can speak for many more than just myself when I say I am truly ashamed to read the gutter minds of a large number of the "-1" and troll / flamebait posters here.
"Everyman's death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind" John Dunne
I hate to see people with so much potential kill themselves. Why do we do this?
I am 23 an have been using pkware since I was about 11 or 12. This is what helped me get into computers.
It is too bad that we couldn't tell him what we felt for him before he died. Tell people around you what they mean to you.
---
Sig Return: 204 No Content
I'm sure this will get lost in the noise, but I'll ask it anyway:
Why was there no PKZip for the Macintosh? A friend of mine once told me that there was a disagreement between Apple and PKWare, and as a result, PKWare refused to make any software for the Macintosh.
Does anyone have any further information or know if this is true?
--
I have read almost all of the comments, the articles, browsed the pkware.com site, and all the time I had this feeling of loss. I am one of those who actually used pkzip and pkunzip quite a lot back at the beginning of the 90es.
Rest in peace, Phil Katz.
Sigged!
Phil you were great! I'll miss you! what a waste!
Non-geniuses die of alcoholism all the time; they just don't get Slashdot articles.
I read an interview with Linus in the Linux Journal (I think it was their November 1999 issue) and Linus doesn't take credit for writing LINUX. He is very modest (and very honest) that he didn't write the LINUX kernel. He knows that it is those many people out there who have written it. Linus is a figurehead, just like the president of the USA and just like so many people out int he world. The media (obviously) wants someone that they can give credit to and they want someone that they can interview when it comes to Linux topics, my guess is that Linus was nominated for this one. It is hard to interview a community, so you find an individual that you can make a representative / ambassador to the community. Bill Joy is not wrong by saying that Linus didn't write LINUX, Linus is just a figure head. If mr Joy wishes to get all pissed off about this, then he doesn't realize the truth of the matter is - he is right.
--------------------------------------------
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
That's the natureal response of a linux user. Please, Janet Reno, make it easier to compete for me. Gates is too good for us, we just want to be famous. Please help!
if(uCodeLoaded && uDoItEveryDay)
{
while(uThinkItWorks)
{
thinkAgain();
}
getClean();
enjoyLife();
}
cat
I was under the impression that it got assimilated by The Borg.
No, really. Sold to Microsoft. Gone forever. Will never be used, by anyone, again.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes this is sad.
That man strugled with SEA for some licensigng issues, and being fustrated witht results rolled his own actually way better method.
Phil Kats was my "friend" way before internet,
in times of 5"1/2 floppies and such.
Well BITNET, ARPA, JANET ect. where still strong.
ARPA and Phil won.
God bless PK
There's been a lot of gushing about how great Phil was. I never met the man but there were plenty of reasons why I refused to allow ZIP files on my BBS 10 years ago. One small one is that v2.04g was broken. PKWare knew it was broken yet they refused to fix it. It would lockup a number of systems and this caused a many SysOps a lot of trouble. But that was just a little thing. The major issue, for me, was the who fiasco dealing with the law suite by SEA. Phil Katz did, in fact, steal the compression algorithms. Plus he played the thing like a David and Goliath. "Poor little guy being sued by the big corporation!" PKWare was just as big a company, if not bigger, than SEA. And Phil's tactic of drawing out the suite while working to make PKZip the defacto standard just made it a moot point when he settled. Very Microsoftian.
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
I've got a great new algorithm that can reduce an 80 megabyte file into a single byte! Still working the bugs out of the decompression side...
Seriously though, compression & decompression are among the trippiest algorithms. Analyzing LZW was one of my greatest mystical experiences on a computer.
And to think recently I was absently wondering what 'pk' stood for, as I was creating a .jar file...
Maybe the message is that we all matter more than we realize.
You'd actually make a good troll if you read a fscking encyclopedia. .sig brought to you in living ASCII!
This
------------------------
Thus Spake ComradePenguin
Just look at the moderations on this:
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=6, Troll=4, Redundant=1, Insightful=1, Funny=10, Overrated=1, Underrated=2, Total=25.
How often is it that a post gets so many mod points wasted on it? This is almost as bad as that now-famous post by OOG a couple weeks ago.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
As more people become frustrated with AOL/TW shoving watered down mass-media crap down their throats, even online, and as DSL circuits make running servers more affordable for hobbyists, look for the online landscape to become heavily dotted with BBS's again.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Adding to the tradgedy is the fact that a simple few can scoff at and spit in the faces of those in mourning.
/.'ers who are trying to understand why a great man is reduced to this.
Posts such as the one above truly sicken me, and all those
Rest in Peace PK, we'll miss you.
Did they bury him in a coffin that was half the size of a normal coffin?
Funny, when I hear "Tom Christiansen" I think "hyperintelligent but self-righteous and totally insufferable zealot". But that's probably because I spend way too much time on perl5-porters.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Yeah I agree totally. What slashdot really needs is a feature that if an article gets moderated down as low as -3 or so, the IP is automaticly posted with it. Slashdot will police itself after that.
Check your facts. The Linux kernel "zImage" and "bzImage" formats are both deflate-based.
"bzImage" is short for "big zImage" -- nothing to do with bzip or bzip2.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
As I remember it, claim two was what really frosted Mr. Katz, and I agreed fully with him:
SEA was claiming that no-one was allowed to write a program that was compatible with Arc!When he wrote PKZip, one of the major changes was his adamant declaration that the format of .zip files was open for all to use, and would always be so. That's where the difference was in my mind---P.K. was willing to fight on a level playing field, and may the best programmer win. For years, P.K. was the winner.
It was that format openness that allowed Info-ZIP to do their work, resulting in their claim that UnZip is ``The Third Most Portable Program in the World''. (See the tiny print at the bottom of the page for the footnote.)
I felt strongly enough about it to send in my $25 for registration. In a small way, Phil Katz was a forerunner of the Free Software movement; his software wasn't free, but his file format was---possibly an even more important freedom.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Jesus christ! How many fucking chances does a guy get? By your own admission he drank and drove and disobeyed the law and didn't appear for his hearing. "Maybe he was a great guy"? Maybe I'm the easter bunny too. You gotta stop learning to give people so much or they'll walk all over you, man.