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

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.