ZIP file had turned Katz into "one of the most well-known shareware authors of all time." Nevertheless, Katz had become the head of a multimillion-dollar company – PKZIP had made PKWARE rich and the. (The company later changed its name to WinZip Computing.) Instead, a company called Nico Mak Computing released WinZip, the first program that handled. Katz was adamantly opposed to Microsoft Windows in the early 1990s and missed out on the chance to be the first developer to bring a ZIP utility to the Windows platform. It had been introduced in 1985 and, by the early 1990s, was becoming popular in consumer and enterprise computer markets. This was, moreover, the first time any compression file format had been released into the public domain and, because it was free, fast, and efficient, the DOS utility garnered attention almost immediately.Īround this time, however, Microsoft Windows, a graphical user interface framework for MS-DOS, had begun to gain prominence. In a time when personal computers with limited disk space were seeing a sharp rise in use, the ability to conserve space with a free compressed file format was big.
And boom: Your file has been compressed.
Suppose we wanted to compress this sentence: “Spiceworks is a community full of SpiceHeads helping other SpiceHeads SpiceHeads helping other SpiceHeads is the point of the Spiceworks Community.” The directory would give each word a number – for instance, SpiceHeads would receive number one – and then, for each repeating word, a single number would indicate two different spots in a sentence where the same word would go. ZIP folders included a directory file that played the role of a cryptographer's code book, holding the information necessary to render the compressed files.Īn easy way to understand how ZIP compression works is by analogy.
The ZIP compression system was (and is) able to archive files in a folder by means of a 32-bit cyclic redundancy check ( CRC) algorithm to compress file sizes. Katz's new file compression system was more than a variant on ARC. In a time when personal computers with limited disk space were seeing a sharp rise in use, the ability to conserve space with a free compressed file format was big. He would write the same program several different ways, test the results of each, and then pick a winner.
He had cut his teeth as a programmer at Allen-Bradley and had developed a reputation for being able to optimize code.
As a 24-year-old programmer, Katz had just started a new job at the Milwaukee-based software company Graysoft. "How could I," he wondered, "make this better?" As he looked at the source code for ARC, Katz was enthralled. As Phil Katz scrolled through files on a bulletin board system in 1986, he came across something interesting: System Enhancement Associates (SEA) had released the source code for its proprietary file compression system ARC. He was 37 years old and, just 12 years before, he had developed something called the. His obituary would describe him as completely and utterly alone, "estranged long ago from his family and a virtual stranger to the employees of his own company." He sat, bent across a bedside nightstand, a Gideon Bible in the drawer beneath him while his arms cradled an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps.Ī coroner's report would conclude that the cause of death was acute pancreatic bleeding due to chronic alcoholism. On April 14, 2000, a man named Phillip Katz was found dead in a hotel room.