Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

bbsdocumentary.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 134 posts

Re: The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

#31

Post by sundvor »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #22
milesf wrote: post #19

Because this is an old post and not someone who is recently deceased, I do not feel what I am about to say is in poor taste. I don't want to see the idea of the loner computer hacker be idealized any longer. Mr Robot, while a clever and more accurate representation of tech than its predecessors, still leans on the troubled genius trope. My main gripe is how software developers are dehumanized into masochistic agents…

Katz's story is perhaps actually an antidote to that: he worked crazy hours much of the time, and ended up dead at 37. What's interesting for me is that many geeks I've worked with have real issues in some regard, in a way that non-geeks seem to find a way to make entertaining (IT Crowd, Big Bang Theory), or simply think is disturbingly sad (the loner in the basement stereotype). The truth is the things that make us…

A lot of us are probably undiagnosed as being on the spectrum. At any rate, alcohol is one of the things that make managing interpersonal relationships easier - and for someone with ASD it can actually be a big benefit socially. It doesn't take a genius to see that there's a big down side potentially waiting to happen too.

Re: The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

#32

Post by orionblastar »

I lost sone friends the same way, alcoholism and mental illnesses seem to be common in my generation. I lost my best friend in 1999 when he bought a shotgun and ended his life. I tried to do all I could to help him but he shut me and everyone out for months until he killed himself.

I've been suicidal myself. It is something not talked out, but it needs to be talked about eventually. Suicide is taking some of the best out of this industry and stress and depression and anxiety mixed with drugs and/or alcohol can lead to these weird behaviors and then suicide unless they are lucky enough to get professional help and the right psychiatrist and medicine and therapy.

I'm on disability and can't work yet, and I have to learn how to program all over again with different languages as what I know is so outdated except for theories.

Re: The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

#33

Post by walrus01 »

dispose13432 wrote: post #29

Off topic, but what was so special about the "zip" file over a ".tar.Z" file, especially that it already existed when ZIP came out?

PKZIP was a msdos oriented format (in the pre windows 98 era) and used extensively by millions of people who never saw a tar file. Long before windows 95 shipped, even. If you had a dos PC running 3.3,4.10 or 5.0 it was the near defacto choice.

Re: The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

#35

Post by duskwuff »

dispose13432 wrote: post #29

Off topic, but what was so special about the "zip" file over a ".tar.Z" file, especially that it already existed when ZIP came out?

- It had a table of contents. You can list the contents of a ZIP file, or even extract individual files, without having to decompress the whole thing. (Which was a particularly big deal back in the 90s, when extracting a large archive would take a while.)

- You could update an archive in place. Not incredibly useful, but certainly nifty.

- It had support for multi-disk archives. Again, big deal in the 90s.

Finally, last but not least: it existed in the PC world. Ports of software between UNIX and PC systems were rare back then, and were made more difficult by the fact that the software would have to run in a segmented (16-bit) x86 environment.

Re: The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

#37

Post by writeslowly »

blinkingled wrote: post #16

For some people conscious existence is too burdensome, uncomfortable, full of anxiety, outright maddening or some combination thereof. You see this in everyday life too, albeit in benign quantities - watch a kid after you tell him he can do nothing for the next hour. I had read Phil Katz's story before and I read it again today - it wasn't any less painful the second time around. I think if we were to debug it - ther…

Your comment reminded me of an essay George Scialabba wrote a couple years ago, "The Endlessly Examined Life" [1], where the author gathered over 40 years of mental health records from his therapists (mostly seeking treatment for depression and anxiety), unable to draw a real conclusion

>I am as puzzled and frustrated by the above records, and by the rest of my psychiatric file, as any casual reader could be. So much earnest effort, so much expert knowledge, so little success. The world’s most common disease is still this opaque.

Having read half a dozen compelling depression memoirs—Styron, Jamison, Millett, Solomon, Kaysen, McMurtry—I was skeptical, when The Baffler proposed publishing extracts from my file, that there was much more to say. Maybe there isn’t, at least not in that register. But maybe it’s enough just to keep talking.

[1] http://thebaffler.com/salvos/endlessly-examined-life

Re: The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

#38

Post by zznneezznnee »

dispose13432 wrote: post #29

Off topic, but what was so special about the "zip" file over a ".tar.Z" file, especially that it already existed when ZIP came out?

I imagine it was just a product of UNIX/academia being somewhat isolated from the general public/BBS world. Before GNU/Linux basically nobody using PCs had access to UNIX-like systems, and probably wouldn't have known of tar's existence.

My older sibling exposed me to tar indirectly by granting me access to their university-provided dialup UNIX account where they ran `elm` for email access, and this happened long after I had been using BBSs for years with my PC.

Never saw a tar file in all my years of PC-based BBS usage. GNU/Linux and Freebsd are largely responsible for the general public accessing *NIX-like systems. BBSs (and their file sharing) were a thing before those existed.

Re: The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

#39

Post by [deleted] »

blinkingled wrote: post #16

For some people conscious existence is too burdensome, uncomfortable, full of anxiety, outright maddening or some combination thereof. You see this in everyday life too, albeit in benign quantities - watch a kid after you tell him he can do nothing for the next hour. I had read Phil Katz's story before and I read it again today - it wasn't any less painful the second time around. I think if we were to debug it - ther…

[deleted]

Re: The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)

#40

Post by jdeibele »

The article kind of glosses over the battle with System Enhancement Associates. As a sysop (long time since I used that word), ARC was extremely popular. Then PKarc came out and it generated files that were more compact but kept the extension .ARC. SEA's product couldn't unpack those. So their product got the reputation as the one that didn't work.

The lawsuit was extremely unpopular given that they were both shareware products and the older, more established company was suing the company with a better product.

It wasn't clear now or then what else SEA could have done.

Post reply on HN