Phil Katz

Phillip W Katz.
Creator of PKZIP.

”Phil Katz changed your life and got very little for it. He felt lonely despite his success”.reported by Al Fasold , The Syracuse Newspapers .The much used ZIP format was created by this man(Phil Katz) who known as one of the "brains," and liked playing chess. He created and distributed his compression software as a shareware during that time. Big companies such as General Motors Corp. sent checks for the code, which became the computing standard.The ZIP format is used for compressing files for efficient storage and easy upload and download.You are responsible to read the pathetic end of this great man if you used the zip files atleast once in your life.So start reading …

Phillip Katz is the Creator of "PKZIP" and the ZIP archive format. His compression software PKZIP (PKWare, Inc) made communication between computers faster and less expensive.

Phillip W. Katz, better known as Phil Katz was born on November 3, 1962. He received a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Madison At home, Mr. Katz often worked late into the night at his IBM personal computer. He spends his spare time tackling a sticky problem: how to compress information so that downloading could be faster and more data stored on computer disks. The most popular of compressing programs at that time was ARC from System Enhancement Associates. ARC was slow at its task and prone to corrupt files. It also had a tendency to crash when compressing or decompressing.

He ultimately produced a breakthrough program that combined several techniques then in use and automatically determined the best in any situation. Mr. Katz posted his code, which he first called PKArc, on Mr. Mahoney's bulletin board, using the "shareware" approach, in which users are invited to try a program and send money to the inventor if they like it. This garnered the attention of SEA. They believed Katz had “borrowed” heavily from ARC’s source code, and took him to court. In a negotiated settlement with SEA, Phil paid their legal bills and agreed to stop selling PKArc. But Phil came back to stage with more powerful, vastly improved program that made both ARC and PKArc look like products of the stone age. It was named PKZip – “Phil Katz’s ZIP program”. PKZIP made Katz one of the most successful shareware authors of all time. Phil made the ZIP file format an open one and made a huge mistake by delaying a Windows version of PKZip, allowing Nicosoft (makers of WinZip) to gain the larger user share that it holds to this day.

Katz battled alcoholism for years. Katz was found dead in a hotel room with an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps in his hand on April 14, 2000 at the age of 37. And five more empties were scattered about the room. A coroner's report stated his death was a result of pancreatic bleeding caused by acute alcoholism. It was a miserable, lonely end for a man who had created a product now in use by millions of people; a product that revolutionized computer data storage and made file transfers less complicated and more efficient.

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