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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.
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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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
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
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.
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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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.
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.
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.