PKZips Phil Katz dead

From: Marvin <marvin_at_rain.org>
Date: Thu Apr 27 17:12:47 2000

I just received this notice from a friend of mine. This was the first notice
I had seen. Anyone know any more of the details?

This appears to be a revisionist report with regard to why Pkzip was
created. I still have some of the email (somewhere) that circulated from
both Katz and the creators of ARC when the creators of ARC sued Katz for
IIRC having something to do with PKARC not being 100% compatible with the
widely used ARC compressions scheme used.

-------------------

PKzip Creator dies . . .
"Phillip W. Katz died of complications from chronic alcoholism, according to
the Milwaulkee medical examiner’s records. Katz’s file-compression software
is used
around the world. '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. ' The
compression software made communication between computers faster and less
expensive." Of all the 'programs' on the planet, PKUnZip has to be one of
the more well-known binaries .
Received on Thu Apr 27 2000 - 17:12:47 BST