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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