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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.
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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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.
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.
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
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
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
Well, from this link, it looks like PKware was competing against winzip.
Reading the documentation for WinZip, I come across this line:
WinZip incorporates compression code by the Info-ZIP group, which is used with their permission.
This seems to indicate to me that WinZip didn't licence anything from PKware.
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
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
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"MIT Jargon File ver 299. This story seems to have been dropped from the current Jargon File 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.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
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.
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.
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 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."
I tend to agree that 'genius' may be stretching it a bit, but that still doesn't mean that the guy didn't do some cool stuff.
Plus, I imagine the ZIP compression algorhythm has some interesting mathemetics to it.
There are a few people I would classify as genius, though. Woz comes to mind.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IIRC, Phil essentially wrote an assembler workalike of ARC, called PKArc. Naturally, it was faster.
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).
The suit basically had 3 claims:
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.
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?
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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).
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.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
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.
IKB = Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the founding father of modern civil engineering. No doubt whatsoever he was a genius.
...) is being foolish.
Anyone who says out of hand that "genius" can only apply to scientists and not engineers (or musicians, or cinema directors, or
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.
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)
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
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,
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.
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
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
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!
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!
Non-geniuses die of alcoholism all the time; they just don't get Slashdot articles.
Whoa, whoa. The ZIP file format and compression algorithms were very deliberately open. There were no patents covering them, and if you ever read the documentation that came with PKZIP, it was clear that he welcomed competition, as he clearly felt that what SEA did was wrong.
Now, yes, there is a patent in PKZIP covering implementation details, but you can make compatable streams without violating the patent, which is exactly what the Info-Zip project did. PKZIP competed on merit by being a damn fast implementation, instead of competing by using legal barriers.
His patent was never violated. The cool thing that PK did wasn't that he let a patent violation slide. It was that he recognized that an interchange format must not be "owned" by anyone (through patents or any other means). It is largely because of this attitude, that the ZIP "filesystem inside a file" and the deflation algorithm have become so widely adopted standards. Absolutely brilliant. His work will outlive him, whereas regardless of SEA's developers' health, ARC is long dead.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Tom Henderson got a lot of flak over the pkarc affair, much of it undeserved. In those days I was involved porting the .ARC format to another OS. The sources of SEA arc were available for non commericial use and they were what made porting arc effectively possible.
.arc files. If you couldn't decompress those files you were locked out of that world.
.arc files. LZW compression was only a very small part of arc.
.arc files anymore! Pkware accidentally had invented the 'embrace and extent' strategy that would be made famous by MS many years later.
.arc format from sort of open source to closed source, made it much more MS-DOS specific and doing so helped make the BBS world much more IBM PC centric. It also served as a dire warning against small companies ever releasing any important source under any kind of licence.
Porting arc was very important for anyone running something other than MSDOS; almost all bbs downloads came as
Luckily SEA's source code was well organized and well documented. This meant it was easily ported to other environments. It also made it relatively easy to reimplement some of the key (de)compression routines in other programs. Well documented source code helps a lot when trying to understand a compression algorithm.
It would also have been easy to create a version of SEA arc with some of the compression code replaced by faster routines. The compression routines were a relatively small part of the code. Also, while there were several compression algorithms in arc only one of them (LZW compression) was actually used 99% of the time. The others were historical and mainly there so you could still read old
Making that algorithm faster wasn't too difficult either. It was written in C, and in those days hand tuned assembler beat code generated by microcomputer compilers by a factor 5 to 10. Also, arc processed it's data byte for byte; switching to a block based strategy for passing data through various stages typically would gain you another factor of 5 to 10.
SEA's suspicion that pkarc might be reusing large parts of arc's source were widely dismissed as nonsense because pkarc was so much faster. But knowing the source code, and given the very similar interface of the two programs it wasn't all that unlikely.
Pkware also added a new compression method that worked better than SEA's LZW compression. This must have been a major blow for SEA commercially - suddenly the latest ARC couldn't read the latest
The new compression method also made porting much more problematic. Pkarc's source was not available. The format was not documented in it's documentation; if it was available it was not widely known. In the it turned out that pkarc's new algorithm was a minor variation the arc LZW format. (It used 13 rather than 12 bit tokens, and the run length encoding preprocessing was removed.)
The final result was that pkarc took the
But PKWare learned it's lesson and went on to produce a steady stream of faster and better compression algorithms. SEA failed to do what it should have done in the first place: solve arc's terrible performance problems. Unisys started behaving like a bunch of jerks.
As an aside:
Around that time free code was usually put in public domain. An endless stream of commercial ripoffs of PD programs with one or two sexy features improved or added was what caused RMS to invent this GPL thing.