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Phil Katz

Phillip W. Katz, better known as Phil Katz (November 3, 1962 - April 14, 2000), was a computer programmer best-known as the author of PKZIP, a program for compressing files.

He received a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

His first foray into the compression world started with a faster version of the popular ARC program, which he called PkArc. PkArc's speed quickly made it popular, much to the chagrin of the ARC authors, SEA. They sued and he was forced to change the program. However it appears the suit was not very specific, because he quickly released PkPac, which was similar in all but name.

PkPac was soon replaced by the new and completely re-written PKZIP. In addition to being much faster and compressing better than ARC, Katz kept the format of the file "open". The PKZIP file format soon became the standard for almost all file compression across all platforms.

Katz died on April 14, 2000 from complications related to chronic alcoholism. He was 37 years old.

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