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

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

#101

Post by JdeBP »

duskwuff wrote: post #35
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, l…

Actually, that's second last. Last, but not least is that .tar.Z did not fit the 8.3 uppercase-only filename structure; nor did the Unix semantics that .Z was one sort of compression and .z another.

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

#102

Post by digi_owl »

philjohn wrote: post #88
hyperpallium wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel most sorry for Tom Henderson, esp at 20:20 claiming he's over it. Low barriers to entry make software easy to get into... and easy for your replacement to get into. It seems software businesses aren't common any more for that reason (excepting MS).

They are, it's just rather than installing the software locally, you access it as a service. And games, games developers are still software companies, albeit in the entertainment space.

And games have largely turned into a service as well.

I got two games as a gift recently, and at least one of them require a big download to even function. And both require that i register them with steam before i can play them at all.

Effectively even "offline" games have just become a client to a "service" running in the clouds.

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

#103

Post by mysterypie »

jdeibele wrote: post #59
msandford wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they have just made him an offer too good to refuse to buy PKarc? I haven't read up on the background so perhaps they already tried this. But it seems like that's the "big company" playbook. At least if you're substantially bigger than your competitor.

There are some programmers on Hacker News who probably are paid more than I'm guessing both companies combined made. As I remember it (could be wrong now), SEA was two programmers and PKWare was Phil Katz (and his mom). "The leaked agreement document revealed that under the settlement terms, the defendants had paid the plaintiff $22,500 for past royalty payments and $40,000 for expense reimbursements." https://en.wik…

I was about to say the same thing. For all the hard work, risks, stress, and high drama involved, we're talking about fairly trivial amounts of money for both parties.

To put it in perspective, the royalty payment that constitutes the settlement is less than what the most people pay for a new car or the average cost of a wedding in the U.S.

Given the leaked documents about the settlement (per Wikipedia) and knowing what most people pay for shareware (which is zero), I doubt the article's claim that Katz had a "multimillion-dollar company". This makes his struggles and story even sadder.

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

#104

Post by shortformblog »

zznneezznnee wrote: post #58
shortformblog wrote: post #30

One of the most heartbreaking stories of of the tech world, and one that comes with a lot of bad blood. Be sure to watch Jason Scott's documentary clip on the ARC vs PKARC battle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiaM5MT1Ok8 I admit that I've always wondered what a dramatic film based on this story would look like. It has all of the highs and lows of a movie, and it would be worth retelling for both the lessons it has…

Thanks for sharing this link, in lieu of watching that I wouldn't have had any idea Phil stole SEA's code to create pkarc/pkzip. I still remember running the self-extracting pkz204g.exe on MS-DOS, and never heard of SEA or encountered their software. That's really unfortunate.

I don't disagree with you on this, but I just want to clarify something: Katz ripped off ARC, that much is clear. But on the other hand, ZIP was a brand-new format that had some differences from ARC. Among those differences is that Katz made the format open, something SEA hadn't done with ARC. This helped ensure its broad uptake as a de facto standard that's still used to this day.

I don't think what Katz did in SEA saga is worth defending, but I think we have to delineate the two formats. As Phil Becker of eSoft says in the clip, the reason that Katz's software ultimately won out was that he was more adept as a businessman—and the open nature of the ZIP format was a good example of that.

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

#105

Post by JdeBP »

zznneezznnee wrote: post #38
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 aft…

Actually, plenty of people had access to UNIX-like systems. There was XENIX, for example, described by some histories as "the most widely installed base of any Unix distribution" of its time.

XENIX is too often forgotten, as is the fact that the Unix world had its "archiver wars", too. In this case it was tar versus cpio, with the POSIX standardization effort settling on "pax", the pun in whose name is reportedly not a coincidence.

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

#106

Post by emmelaich »

reddytowns wrote: post #56
emmelaich wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more poignant and better takeaway: "It tore him up inside when his father died. One time we went to his grave," Fischer says. "He'd always say that when his father was alive they'd go fishing and do man things."

I'd say that parent is more accurate and that is the sanitized version...

If you must, I think it is more about the underlying cause versus the immediate cause.

Of course you speculate whether he would have been an alcoholic if he hadn't had a lonely childhood and hadn't had someone so close to him that died.

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

#107

Post by derekp7 »

shortformblog wrote: post #104
zznneezznnee wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this link, in lieu of watching that I wouldn't have had any idea Phil stole SEA's code to create pkarc/pkzip. I still remember running the self-extracting pkz204g.exe on MS-DOS, and never heard of SEA or encountered their software. That's really unfortunate.

I don't disagree with you on this, but I just want to clarify something: Katz ripped off ARC, that much is clear. But on the other hand, ZIP was a brand-new format that had some differences from ARC. Among those differences is that Katz made the format open, something SEA hadn't done with ARC. This helped ensure its broad uptake as a de facto standard that's still used to this day. I don't think what Katz did in SEA…

Don't forget, that this was also in the middle of the various look-and-feel lawsuits that were going on at the time. Lotus vs. Paperback Software, Lotus vs. Borland, Apple vs. Microsoft, Stac Electronics vs. Microsoft, etc.

Also, remember that PKarc was popular because it was faster than Arc. The feeling in the BBS community at the time were feeling a bit of rage, that a superior product was being killed through the courts. So when PKzip came out, which was not only faster, but had a better compression ratio, combined with the general sentiment in the community that were fed up with look-and-feel lawsuits, doing a mass conversion from arc to zip was also a form of public protest.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

writeslowly wrote: post #37
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 muc…

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by JamesBarney »

labrador wrote: post #41

I'm not knocking anyone that talks about emotional pain as a reason to drink, but I want to offer an alternative theory alcoholism based on my experience. Many if not most people have settled on the theory of escape from a painful existence as an explanation, including many alcoholics. I've been battling alcohol since I was a teenager and now I'm almost 60. I've been in and out of rehab, lots of therapy and psychiatr…

One way it hijacks the mind is through opiate receptors. I've heard good things about the Sinclair method(taking an opiate-blocker before having a drink), and it operates by blocking a lot of the euphoric aspects of alcohol. And slowly it causes the hooks that alcohol has sunk into the brain to whither and die. Or at least that's the theory.

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

#110

Post by hiddenname »

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…

This is me. I know madness and it's horrible, it's not scary it's an emotion of pure confusing intensity. I've been able to medicate away the intolerable symptoms, and it was never so severe as to be debilitating, but if I had to live like that day-in and day-out I would end my life quickly.

Until I experienced the emotionless emotions/feelings I couldn't have imagined it. We take for granted that our brain functions properly, even depression and other ailments are comprehensible, it's the incomprehensible emotions that can't be lived through.

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