20 ms·

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

365 points by sanimal 10y ago

jdeibele 10y ago
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.
- msandford 10y ago
  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.
  - jdeibele 10y ago
    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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz
    - mysterypie 10y ago
      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.
  - rockdoe 10y ago
    Despite the name it was actually the smaller company. The relevant articles and info are linked from Wikipedia and make for interesting reading. When Katz died people asked the ARC people what they thought about him: http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html
    - photogrammetry 10y ago
      From your link: >So now Phil Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie. What a heartless asshole.
      - chipotle_coyote 10y ago
        I am old enough to have actually been involved with FidoNet when all of this was going down, and at the time Katz pretty much had the community believing that he was a little guy being unfairly squashed by the huge corporate behemoth of System Enhancement Associates for making a better version of their software. Pretty much every single bit of that turned out, indeed, to be a lie. Katz did steal SEA's work and claimed otherwise, and SEA was smaller than PKWare. I get where you're coming from, but Katz basically stole Henderson's work, lied about it, and destroyed Henderson's business and, for many years, his reputation. I don't think I can really blame him for not having been terribly diplomatic about the man's death.
        supersan 10y ago
        This 8 year old comment on reddit[1] sheds more light on the controversy from a person who knew him I guess. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/74x5e/phil_katz_author_of_pkzip/c05orfa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/74x5e/phil_kat...
        agumonkey 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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estrabd 10y ago
Always a good cautionary tail.
throwitaway83 10y ago
As someone who is in recovery, this story always hits close to home. The anxiety, guilt, and paranoia that comes with addiction is brutal. I was on the verge on losing everything including two young daughters. What a fucking horrible disease.
maxander 10y ago
A tragic tale, and a reminder that intelligence and business success are no replacement for mental health. Even in the BBC's account, the tone of the writing seems to present a lot of warning signs and developing problems as just a genius' wacky eccentricities. If you require substances in order to function, can't maintain social relationships or struggle with harmful lifestyles, these aren't mere character traits, they're symptoms of real and treatable illnesses. Presenting these things as "the dark side of being smart" is a popular story, but its harmful in the long run.
- pcl 10y ago
  The article is not affiliated with the BBC -- it's published on bbsdocumentaries.com.
  - maxander 10y ago
    Oops, good catch- one letter makes a substantial difference! Should have wondered why a BBC documentary was being presented in plaintext format, anyway...
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Something like 10 years ago I heard about a book called emotional intelligence. That title shocked me. Few people told me everything that they found hard was easy for me, while everything that was easy for them was hard for me. There's a lot of knowledge about the emotional, or socio-affective, space that's worth not ignoring. Sadly society kinda put "wit" over "wise" and I, maybe others, fell in the brainiac race trap.
Animats 10y ago
Short version: alcohol.
- andrewguenther 10y ago
  I think that's a bit of an insensitive summary.
  - cgvgffyv 10y ago
    Seems to be what all commenters above are focusing on though. (and thus completely miss the point)
  - user5994461 10y ago
    I think it's a good summary nonetheless. Short, to the point, and may not have to read the article after it.
- emmelaich 10y ago
  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."
  - reddytowns 10y ago
    I'd say that parent is more accurate and that is the sanitized version...
    - emmelaich 10y ago
      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.
      - 10y ago
babbage12 10y ago
I just lost my best mate from university to alcohol. Growing up in Britain, this is not my first friend I've lost because of alcohol. I'm in tears... I've struggled with drinking too much myself, this hits very close to home.
- PaulRobinson 10y ago
  As somebody who has watched people struggle and seen them fail and succeed, I can relate. Also a Brit, also like a pint. Helped people who were hitting the alcho-pops at 8am (doesn't smell like booze on the breath, see?). I'm p7r on twitter and reddit. If you ever want to chat, let me know, I'll follow you back, we can DM, or just PM me on reddit. It's a sincere offer: I hope in the morning you're feeling more optimistic and know you're not alone and there are people who give a fuck. The things that make us able to do amazing things are also the things that make us do terrible things to ourselves. We should talk about that more as a community.
  - icantdrive55 10y ago
    I've stopped and failed drinking too many times to count. My psychiatrist told me flat out, "Don't even try to stop on you're own. It's just too f---ing dangerous." I used that terrible advice for years. I kept on drinking. I went to A.A., and just coudn't stomach it, on so many levels. I wasen't going to spend my last $15 grand on a expensive rehab. I did taper off around ten years ago. It took a few weeks. I knew it would be dangerous to just stop. I did everything the experts told me not to do; like have alcohol around the house, and hang around people who drink. We all drink for different reasons. I felt I was drinking to control my anxiety; and much of the time I was self-medicating. I tapered down to a few drinks a day--I finally got down to one, or no drinks. My point is if anyone reading this is trying to stop drinking, and the status quo advice just isn't working, if I could taped down, I honestly think most people can. (Try not to drink hard alcohol. That really did a number on my body. When I went back to wine, and beer; It was only then could I begin to even think about tapering down to no drinks. I'm not giving advice. I'm just stating what worked for me. I really thought I was hopeless. My father, and grandfather both died from liver tumors that metastasized into cancer. Both were big drinkers. I didn't think I had a chance in hell. Plus--I had a nervous breakdown in graduate school, which turned into generalized anxiety. I still drink, but it's not much. I'm not the bloated mess I used to be. My life is still not great, but it's not due to alcohol.)
ino 10y ago
I remember reading this a few years ago, and it touched me as it is touching me now again. I don't remember computers without pkzip/pkunzip. They've always been around, many copies on floppies containing games and other software, maybe just in case someone ever found a computer without them. My school computers also had them, and we quickly learned there wasn't any benifit of compressing a compressed file. We had pointless discussions about comparisons with arj and rar without even knowing how they worked.
isuckatcoding 10y ago
Wow that was difficult to read. Not that I'm an alcoholic but I can relate to some of the things he was going through.
- imdsm 10y ago
  Yeah, read it about 3 or 4 times now, and it always seems to be late at night (UK here) when I read it. Here I am, while my family sleeps, working away in the quiet solitude of night. Luckily though, I'm drinking tea, not alcohol.
ivrrimum 10y ago
My condolences.
deleted 10y ago
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blinkingled 10y ago
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 - there doesn't seem to be any one unmistakable conclusion, rather a combination. It would all depend on how severely one reacts to their emotional trauma. Some people are numbed, some are able to move on, some find healthy diversions in hobbies, people, achievements and some like Phil just plain fail to function well and have to resort to drugs and alcohol in order to run away from the living nightmare. I think at some point existence becomes rather more painful than death for some - that's the only way you're able to kill yourself without regard. Humans are puzzling as a species - all the years of conditioning, the everyday conflicts and contradictions we have to face, the constant need for asserting our existence through external means, the need for relations, the child/parent and then spouse systems and all the things that can go wrong with them, all the other uncertainties - amazingly many live through this but some just can't escape the dread.
- writeslowly 10y ago
  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 http://thebaffler.com/salvos/endlessly-examined-life
  - deleted 10y ago
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milesf 10y ago
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 of hyper productivity. It's unhealthy, it's exploitive, and it's simply not true. Silicon Valley loves stories like Phil Katz because it gives them a pass to treat up-and-coming coders horribly. 90+ hour workweeks, death marches, and insane deadlines not only leads to burnout, it results in poor work. Longevity and balance and much more noble pursuits in the tech world. As DHH used to say, put away the Superman cape. We don't need heroics, we need sane, well-rested creatives who enjoy their work. If you want real heroes, look at men & women who are in their 70's and 80's who are still banging out lines of code.
- PaulRobinson 10y ago
  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 great geeks can also make us a little self-destructive, and we should probably as a community talk about that some more. Spending your formative years as an outsider and then finding yourself as an adult a highly in-demand insider is potentially damaging. It's compounded when - as many of us do - we realise that social anxiety can dissipate with alcohol and use of other drugs. We've all watched it. Some of us have done it. We need to be a bit more open about discussing it, I think. Thinking about going first and writing a blog this weekend, but man, it'll be emotionally raw for me, and possibly cringe-inducing for others...
  - sundvor 10y ago
    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.
ncdr 10y ago
Are there any other famous names? Looks like he was the only one - just one sample, i.e. not representative, i.e. total bs... Cheers!
- duskwuff 10y ago
  What are you even trying to claim is "total bs" here?
mwcampbell 10y ago
I wonder how he would have reacted if he had lived to see the integration of his ZIP file format into Windows itself, starting with Windows XP in 2001.
- cuckcuckspruce 10y ago
  I don't think he'd have a problem with it considering he released the specification for the Zip format freely[1]. [1] https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT
dispose13432 10y ago
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?
- zznneezznnee 10y ago
  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.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    The whole mainframe world was massively insular, and thus the micro/PC world basically had to invent gunpowder all over again. You can see it play out too this day.
  - JdeBP 10y ago
    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.
- walrus01 10y ago
  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.
- deleted 10y ago
shortformblog 10y ago
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 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 to teach but also the important role in computer history Katz held.
- Assembly64 10y ago
  Seems like Phil Katz literally stole code from ARC, so much for being a genius.
- hyperpallium 10y ago
  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).
  - philjohn 10y ago
    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.
    - hyperpallium 10y ago
      Aren't most SaaS's not pure software, but sell data, communication or offline product/service, and in that way differ from installed software? The difficult programming in games seems mostly deferred to engines (which are becoming cheaper and nore commoditized), and the game is mostly "content" - more akin to a movie than software. But you're right, games are software, and are thriving.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
orionblastar 10y ago
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.
labrador 10y ago
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 psychiatry, lots of sober time, a family with grown kids, a successful career and yet my most recent relapse almost killed me. More on that at the end. Alcoholism is beyond thought and emotion. It operates at another level. It takes Kings and Queens. It takes happy family men, while often skipping abused children who grow up to be unhappy adults that can't hold a family together. It takes spiritual and religious leaders such as Alan Watts. The list of great, productive and seemingly happy people who are destroyed by alcohol is a long one. My theory is that is a genetic glitch that allows alcohol to get hooked into the autonomic nervous system. It's telling in "Leaving Las Vegas" a woman tells Cage's character to quit drinking and he replies "why don't you tell me to stop breathing?" Carl Sagan liked to talk about our reptilian brain. That's the way I look at it. When the lizard brain wants a drink, it's going to get a drink. Luckily for me, it's not all the time. The urge comes and goes (sometimes for years.) The gene seems to run in families. If it is cured, my bet it will be through genetic therapy. I'm not saying that resolving emotional issues doesn't make it easier to stay sober. Many things make it easier to stay sober. Sometimes I just go somewhere where I can't get it. That helps. It's why a lot of guys stay in the Navy. They have productive sober time at sea. Finding other activities and diversions certainly help. I like to program. I've often stayed sober by programming. My last relapse almost killed me because I'm finding as I have become older, my ability to fight it is greatly weakened. On top of that, I go into a trance-like state where I stay I will stay drunk for days and weeks at a time unless someone who knows me intervenes. That is terrible on the body and as the body weakens, the ability to resist weakens. The downward spiral can be quick and brutal.
- Mtinie 10y ago
  You aren't alone. Should you ever want to chat/commiserate/pair program, you can contact me through my HN account. I don't have it all, though I have a lot, but I still find myself continuously drawn to a side that defies my own logic. I both glad and saddened to hear that I'm not alone.
burger_moon 10y ago
Wow this is the first time I've heard this story or heard of Phil Katz. I grew up in Milwaukee and went to UWM as well so the familiarities about hearing about someone like Phil is pretty incredible and sad.
smarks 10y ago
Very sad story. The guy's initials are immortalized in the magic number of the zip file format, the bytes of which are 0x50 0x4b 0x03 0x04 The values 0x50 0x4b are 'P' 'K' in ASCII. Note also that every Java JAR file is also a ZIP file, so they all begin with the same magic number.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Windows executables start with "MZ", for Mark Zbikowski. Edit: fixed the name
  - uiri 10y ago
    I tried googling this but nothing came up until I stumbled across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable which says it stands for Mark Zbikowski (which is supported by a quick Google of that name).
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      You're right, I mis-remembered it. Thanks for the correction!
  - gonzo 10y ago
    FreeBSD (and other BSD) UFS2 file systems have a magic number that coincides with Kirk McKusick's birthday. #define FS_UFS2_MAGIC 0x19540119
    - JdeBP 10y ago
      The birthdays of Linus Torvalds and some of his relatives are encoded, in hexadecimal, in the magic constants passed to the Linux reboot() system call.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    More recently I found out that systemd binary format starts with LPKS and a few other initials. Those who know the dev team can easily find which is who.
boot13 10y ago
Literally the first letter of this is a typo. Sad story though.
known 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz
wallflower 10y ago
> But even as Windows-based "zip" products nibbled into PKWare's sales Anyone remember Niko Mak? I heard whisper numbers back in the late 90s of high six figure monthly licensing revenue from companies that were desperate to remain BSA legal (their employees downloaded WinZip for personal use and exposed businesses to legal liability for using unlicensed software). He seems to have disappeared, as he rightly deserves. I assume he changed his name and lives on a private island. I still get WinZip marketing spam on my old email account. Last I remember, they were at version 67...
dispose13432 10y ago
Also, as far as I know the ZIP file format wasn't patented.
- transitorykris 10y ago
  File format no, compression yes https://www.google.com/patents/US5051745 https://www.google.com/patents/US5051745
aryehof 10y ago
A sad outcome. I will more remember Phil Katz for brazenly copying SEA code to create the basis for his initial success - PKARC. His greatest achievement in my opinion was succeeding in convincing a whole community of programmers, that he was the victim, and not "evil" SEA.
horatiocain 10y ago
Jesus fucking Christ

365 points by sanimal 10y ago

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.

msandford 10y ago
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.
- jdeibele 10y ago
  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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz
  - mysterypie 10y ago
    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.
- rockdoe 10y ago
  Despite the name it was actually the smaller company. The relevant articles and info are linked from Wikipedia and make for interesting reading. When Katz died people asked the ARC people what they thought about him: http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html
  - photogrammetry 10y ago
    From your link: >So now Phil Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie. What a heartless asshole.
    - chipotle_coyote 10y ago
      I am old enough to have actually been involved with FidoNet when all of this was going down, and at the time Katz pretty much had the community believing that he was a little guy being unfairly squashed by the huge corporate behemoth of System Enhancement Associates for making a better version of their software. Pretty much every single bit of that turned out, indeed, to be a lie. Katz did steal SEA's work and claimed otherwise, and SEA was smaller than PKWare. I get where you're coming from, but Katz basically stole Henderson's work, lied about it, and destroyed Henderson's business and, for many years, his reputation. I don't think I can really blame him for not having been terribly diplomatic about the man's death.
      - supersan 10y ago
        This 8 year old comment on reddit[1] sheds more light on the controversy from a person who knew him I guess. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/74x5e/phil_katz_author_of_pkzip/c05orfa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/74x5e/phil_kat...
        agumonkey 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

estrabd 10y ago

Always a good cautionary tail.

throwitaway83 10y ago

As someone who is in recovery, this story always hits close to home. The anxiety, guilt, and paranoia that comes with addiction is brutal. I was on the verge on losing everything including two young daughters. What a fucking horrible disease.

maxander 10y ago

A tragic tale, and a reminder that intelligence and business success are no replacement for mental health. Even in the BBC's account, the tone of the writing seems to present a lot of warning signs and developing problems as just a genius' wacky eccentricities. If you require substances in order to function, can't maintain social relationships or struggle with harmful lifestyles, these aren't mere character traits, they're symptoms of real and treatable illnesses. Presenting these things as "the dark side of being smart" is a popular story, but its harmful in the long run.

pcl 10y ago
The article is not affiliated with the BBC -- it's published on bbsdocumentaries.com.
- maxander 10y ago
  Oops, good catch- one letter makes a substantial difference! Should have wondered why a BBC documentary was being presented in plaintext format, anyway...
agumonkey 10y ago
Something like 10 years ago I heard about a book called emotional intelligence. That title shocked me. Few people told me everything that they found hard was easy for me, while everything that was easy for them was hard for me. There's a lot of knowledge about the emotional, or socio-affective, space that's worth not ignoring. Sadly society kinda put "wit" over "wise" and I, maybe others, fell in the brainiac race trap.

Animats 10y ago

Short version: alcohol.

andrewguenther 10y ago
I think that's a bit of an insensitive summary.
- cgvgffyv 10y ago
  Seems to be what all commenters above are focusing on though. (and thus completely miss the point)
- user5994461 10y ago
  I think it's a good summary nonetheless. Short, to the point, and may not have to read the article after it.
emmelaich 10y ago
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."
- reddytowns 10y ago
  I'd say that parent is more accurate and that is the sanitized version...
  - emmelaich 10y ago
    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.
    - 10y ago

babbage12 10y ago

I just lost my best mate from university to alcohol. Growing up in Britain, this is not my first friend I've lost because of alcohol. I'm in tears... I've struggled with drinking too much myself, this hits very close to home.

PaulRobinson 10y ago
As somebody who has watched people struggle and seen them fail and succeed, I can relate. Also a Brit, also like a pint. Helped people who were hitting the alcho-pops at 8am (doesn't smell like booze on the breath, see?). I'm p7r on twitter and reddit. If you ever want to chat, let me know, I'll follow you back, we can DM, or just PM me on reddit. It's a sincere offer: I hope in the morning you're feeling more optimistic and know you're not alone and there are people who give a fuck. The things that make us able to do amazing things are also the things that make us do terrible things to ourselves. We should talk about that more as a community.
- icantdrive55 10y ago
  I've stopped and failed drinking too many times to count. My psychiatrist told me flat out, "Don't even try to stop on you're own. It's just too f---ing dangerous." I used that terrible advice for years. I kept on drinking. I went to A.A., and just coudn't stomach it, on so many levels. I wasen't going to spend my last $15 grand on a expensive rehab. I did taper off around ten years ago. It took a few weeks. I knew it would be dangerous to just stop. I did everything the experts told me not to do; like have alcohol around the house, and hang around people who drink. We all drink for different reasons. I felt I was drinking to control my anxiety; and much of the time I was self-medicating. I tapered down to a few drinks a day--I finally got down to one, or no drinks. My point is if anyone reading this is trying to stop drinking, and the status quo advice just isn't working, if I could taped down, I honestly think most people can. (Try not to drink hard alcohol. That really did a number on my body. When I went back to wine, and beer; It was only then could I begin to even think about tapering down to no drinks. I'm not giving advice. I'm just stating what worked for me. I really thought I was hopeless. My father, and grandfather both died from liver tumors that metastasized into cancer. Both were big drinkers. I didn't think I had a chance in hell. Plus--I had a nervous breakdown in graduate school, which turned into generalized anxiety. I still drink, but it's not much. I'm not the bloated mess I used to be. My life is still not great, but it's not due to alcohol.)

ino 10y ago

I remember reading this a few years ago, and it touched me as it is touching me now again. I don't remember computers without pkzip/pkunzip. They've always been around, many copies on floppies containing games and other software, maybe just in case someone ever found a computer without them. My school computers also had them, and we quickly learned there wasn't any benifit of compressing a compressed file. We had pointless discussions about comparisons with arj and rar without even knowing how they worked.

isuckatcoding 10y ago

Wow that was difficult to read. Not that I'm an alcoholic but I can relate to some of the things he was going through.

imdsm 10y ago
Yeah, read it about 3 or 4 times now, and it always seems to be late at night (UK here) when I read it. Here I am, while my family sleeps, working away in the quiet solitude of night. Luckily though, I'm drinking tea, not alcohol.

ivrrimum 10y ago

My condolences.

deleted 10y ago

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blinkingled 10y ago

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 - there doesn't seem to be any one unmistakable conclusion, rather a combination. It would all depend on how severely one reacts to their emotional trauma. Some people are numbed, some are able to move on, some find healthy diversions in hobbies, people, achievements and some like Phil just plain fail to function well and have to resort to drugs and alcohol in order to run away from the living nightmare. I think at some point existence becomes rather more painful than death for some - that's the only way you're able to kill yourself without regard. Humans are puzzling as a species - all the years of conditioning, the everyday conflicts and contradictions we have to face, the constant need for asserting our existence through external means, the need for relations, the child/parent and then spouse systems and all the things that can go wrong with them, all the other uncertainties - amazingly many live through this but some just can't escape the dread.

writeslowly 10y ago
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 http://thebaffler.com/salvos/endlessly-examined-life
- deleted 10y ago
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milesf 10y ago

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 of hyper productivity. It's unhealthy, it's exploitive, and it's simply not true. Silicon Valley loves stories like Phil Katz because it gives them a pass to treat up-and-coming coders horribly. 90+ hour workweeks, death marches, and insane deadlines not only leads to burnout, it results in poor work. Longevity and balance and much more noble pursuits in the tech world. As DHH used to say, put away the Superman cape. We don't need heroics, we need sane, well-rested creatives who enjoy their work. If you want real heroes, look at men & women who are in their 70's and 80's who are still banging out lines of code.

PaulRobinson 10y ago
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 great geeks can also make us a little self-destructive, and we should probably as a community talk about that some more. Spending your formative years as an outsider and then finding yourself as an adult a highly in-demand insider is potentially damaging. It's compounded when - as many of us do - we realise that social anxiety can dissipate with alcohol and use of other drugs. We've all watched it. Some of us have done it. We need to be a bit more open about discussing it, I think. Thinking about going first and writing a blog this weekend, but man, it'll be emotionally raw for me, and possibly cringe-inducing for others...
- sundvor 10y ago
  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.

ncdr 10y ago

Are there any other famous names? Looks like he was the only one - just one sample, i.e. not representative, i.e. total bs... Cheers!

duskwuff 10y ago
What are you even trying to claim is "total bs" here?

mwcampbell 10y ago

I wonder how he would have reacted if he had lived to see the integration of his ZIP file format into Windows itself, starting with Windows XP in 2001.

cuckcuckspruce 10y ago
I don't think he'd have a problem with it considering he released the specification for the Zip format freely[1]. [1] https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT

dispose13432 10y ago

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?

zznneezznnee 10y ago
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.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  The whole mainframe world was massively insular, and thus the micro/PC world basically had to invent gunpowder all over again. You can see it play out too this day.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  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.
walrus01 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago

shortformblog 10y ago

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 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 to teach but also the important role in computer history Katz held.

Assembly64 10y ago
Seems like Phil Katz literally stole code from ARC, so much for being a genius.
hyperpallium 10y ago
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).
- philjohn 10y ago
  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.
  - hyperpallium 10y ago
    Aren't most SaaS's not pure software, but sell data, communication or offline product/service, and in that way differ from installed software? The difficult programming in games seems mostly deferred to engines (which are becoming cheaper and nore commoditized), and the game is mostly "content" - more akin to a movie than software. But you're right, games are software, and are thriving.
  - digi_owl 10y ago

orionblastar 10y ago

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.

labrador 10y ago

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 psychiatry, lots of sober time, a family with grown kids, a successful career and yet my most recent relapse almost killed me. More on that at the end. Alcoholism is beyond thought and emotion. It operates at another level. It takes Kings and Queens. It takes happy family men, while often skipping abused children who grow up to be unhappy adults that can't hold a family together. It takes spiritual and religious leaders such as Alan Watts. The list of great, productive and seemingly happy people who are destroyed by alcohol is a long one. My theory is that is a genetic glitch that allows alcohol to get hooked into the autonomic nervous system. It's telling in "Leaving Las Vegas" a woman tells Cage's character to quit drinking and he replies "why don't you tell me to stop breathing?" Carl Sagan liked to talk about our reptilian brain. That's the way I look at it. When the lizard brain wants a drink, it's going to get a drink. Luckily for me, it's not all the time. The urge comes and goes (sometimes for years.) The gene seems to run in families. If it is cured, my bet it will be through genetic therapy. I'm not saying that resolving emotional issues doesn't make it easier to stay sober. Many things make it easier to stay sober. Sometimes I just go somewhere where I can't get it. That helps. It's why a lot of guys stay in the Navy. They have productive sober time at sea. Finding other activities and diversions certainly help. I like to program. I've often stayed sober by programming. My last relapse almost killed me because I'm finding as I have become older, my ability to fight it is greatly weakened. On top of that, I go into a trance-like state where I stay I will stay drunk for days and weeks at a time unless someone who knows me intervenes. That is terrible on the body and as the body weakens, the ability to resist weakens. The downward spiral can be quick and brutal.

Mtinie 10y ago
You aren't alone. Should you ever want to chat/commiserate/pair program, you can contact me through my HN account. I don't have it all, though I have a lot, but I still find myself continuously drawn to a side that defies my own logic. I both glad and saddened to hear that I'm not alone.

burger_moon 10y ago

Wow this is the first time I've heard this story or heard of Phil Katz. I grew up in Milwaukee and went to UWM as well so the familiarities about hearing about someone like Phil is pretty incredible and sad.

smarks 10y ago

Very sad story. The guy's initials are immortalized in the magic number of the zip file format, the bytes of which are 0x50 0x4b 0x03 0x04 The values 0x50 0x4b are 'P' 'K' in ASCII. Note also that every Java JAR file is also a ZIP file, so they all begin with the same magic number.

WalterBright 10y ago
Windows executables start with "MZ", for Mark Zbikowski. Edit: fixed the name
- uiri 10y ago
  I tried googling this but nothing came up until I stumbled across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable which says it stands for Mark Zbikowski (which is supported by a quick Google of that name).
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    You're right, I mis-remembered it. Thanks for the correction!
- gonzo 10y ago
  FreeBSD (and other BSD) UFS2 file systems have a magic number that coincides with Kirk McKusick's birthday. #define FS_UFS2_MAGIC 0x19540119
  - JdeBP 10y ago
    The birthdays of Linus Torvalds and some of his relatives are encoded, in hexadecimal, in the magic constants passed to the Linux reboot() system call.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  More recently I found out that systemd binary format starts with LPKS and a few other initials. Those who know the dev team can easily find which is who.

boot13 10y ago

Literally the first letter of this is a typo. Sad story though.

known 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz

wallflower 10y ago

> But even as Windows-based "zip" products nibbled into PKWare's sales Anyone remember Niko Mak? I heard whisper numbers back in the late 90s of high six figure monthly licensing revenue from companies that were desperate to remain BSA legal (their employees downloaded WinZip for personal use and exposed businesses to legal liability for using unlicensed software). He seems to have disappeared, as he rightly deserves. I assume he changed his name and lives on a private island. I still get WinZip marketing spam on my old email account. Last I remember, they were at version 67...

dispose13432 10y ago

Also, as far as I know the ZIP file format wasn't patented.

transitorykris 10y ago
File format no, compression yes https://www.google.com/patents/US5051745 https://www.google.com/patents/US5051745

aryehof 10y ago

A sad outcome. I will more remember Phil Katz for brazenly copying SEA code to create the basis for his initial success - PKARC. His greatest achievement in my opinion was succeeding in convincing a whole community of programmers, that he was the victim, and not "evil" SEA.

horatiocain 10y ago

Jesus fucking Christ