Short: Phil Katz has passed away Author: kbze@hrtlnd.net (Kevin Boyd Zagonyi Eckenrode) Uploader: kbze hrtlnd net (Kevin Boyd Zagonyi Eckenrode) Type: docs/anno Replaces: None Requires: Text viewer Architecture: generic The Info-Zip home page, which has moved to http://www.freesoftware.com/pub/infozip, announces that Phil Katz died on April 14th. That's PKWare's founder, the creator of Zip, which might not have happened if he hadn't improved the company SEA's Arc program around 1988 or so, and I believe they sued him so he created Zip instead. The rest is history, although PKAZip never took off, and the current Info-Zip packages will likely still never compete with the Amiga's most popular archive formats, lha and lzx. At the time, Phil Katz had a great many supporters on the BBSs, and we happily "mentally" condemned SEA for how they handled Phil Katz's improvements to their program. I've always had a tremendous amount of respect for Phil Katz, and I wish I knew more about him. All http://www.pkware.com says is that PKZip's creator, Phil Katz, passed away. If you click on it, all it does is bring up a welcome screen giving a history of PKWare but not mentioning Phil Katz. To keep redundant data on the internet to a minimum, the actual .txt file and .readme are the same; and I've included the URLs of some interesting information regarding Phil Katz and his death: The original e-obituary: http://www.jsonline.com/news/obits/apr00/KatzPhillipW041900.asp A message thread with some interesting further information, including: more extensive information regarding how he died (I don't necessarily believe everything I read on the web, and this is one thing I'll take with a grain of salt just on principal - you'll see why): http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/TELECOM_Digest_Online/1050.html other interesting information: http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/TELECOM_Digest_Online/1061.html http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/TELECOM_Digest_Online/1075.html http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/TELECOM_Digest_Online/1091.html http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/TELECOM_Digest_Online/1109.html Readme created with ARC 3.2 - Copyright (c)1996-99 by Jens Weyer.