I'm old enough to remember when I thought Phil Katz was brilliant and a
genus to come up with a solution that would allow people to download
gigantic files with slow modems.  Now we take it for granted.  Thanks for
all the access to information you created Phil Katz!!

kelly

the New York Times


May 1, 2000

Phillip Katz, Creator of Zip Software, 37

     P hillip W. Katz, the inventor of file-compression software used in
     computers around the world, died on April 14 in a hotel room in
     Milwaukee. He was 37.

     The cause was complications from alcoholism, according to a report
     from the Milwaukee medical examiner's office.

     Mr. Katz's program, PKZip, played a major role in making Internet
     communications faster and less expensive. The "zip file," the
     archive he developed, compresses information so that it takes up
     less space on a disk drive and less time is needed to download it
     from the Web or send it to another computer.

     In an interview with The Milwaukee Journal in 1993, Mr. Katz said
     he had developed the concept for PKZip at his mother's kitchen
     table in 1986. "It was just a hobby," he said. "I didn't expect it
     to turn into a business." Mr. Katz is survived by his mother,
     Hildegard, and his sister, Cynthia.

     Mr. Katz built a company called PKWare Inc. on the success of the
     file-compression program and became its president. Today, files
     compressed with Mr. Katz's software are ubiquitous and the term
     "zip file" is familiar to even casual computer users.


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