11 ms·
The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoFunny I was just writing a simple .zip file filter (carver) and thinking about those initials in every .zip file, "PK". The filter takes an HTTP stream (headers, chunking, etc.) on stdin and outputs only the .zip file on stdout. When studying the zip format, you can find yourself thinking, wow, this is really brilliant and then you remember the sad story of the guy who created it (this article in particular).
- greggman3 6y agozip is a horribly designed format https://games.greggman.com/game/zip-rant/ https://games.greggman.com/game/zip-rant/ There were precedents of well designed file formats long before .zip hit the scene. Of course there wasn't the internet so being aware of better format designs might not have been common
- stonogo 6y agoComputer communications predates the internet. We definitely knew about them. Nobody wanted to pay for them. Also, it was in everyone's best interest to informally standardize on a tool -- in those days, having to download an extraction tool in addition to the archive you wanted was a nontrivial cost (real monetary cost, not just opportunity cost of wasting more time). Once SEA decided to start a legal fight, consensus was reached pretty quickly that nobody wanted to be the one jerk left using ARC. There were semi-organized grassroots campaigns to get laggards to switch. The personal computer software world was less stringent about standards at the time, and the tool that worked well enough was always going to beat the tool that pleased the software engineers.
- greggman3 6y agoMy comment wasn't about paying for formats. It was about designing formats. The zip format is extremely poorly designed. See linked article above
- stonogo 6y agoI already know the zip format. Formats were not open then. You did not select archive tools based on the on-disk format it used; you selected archive tools based on a combination of software cost, compression performance, and network effects. Having multiple implementations of software that could work on the same archive format was a novelty which often resulted in legal battles, as the formats themselves were often considered proprietary information.
- greggman3 6y agoYou still seem to be arguing over compression formats. I'm not saying there were better or worse compression formats. I'm only saying (a) zip is a badly designed format ... see article on why (b) the concept of a well designed file format (related to compression or not) was already well known in 1989 when zip shipped.
- knome 6y agoThe reference to "arc wars" in the original article seemed interesting. I did a quick search and was pleased to have found these at textfiles.com http://textfiles.com/computers/sea.txt http://textfiles.com/computers/sea.txt http://textfiles.com/computers/arcsuit.txt http://textfiles.com/computers/arcsuit.txt
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago"SEA claimed trademark infringement on the name "ARC," and violation of their copyright on the "look and feel" of ARC's command-line user- interface, in addition to charging Katz with appropriating ARC program code." The "look and feel" of the command line interface. By the mid-1990s people seemed to assume this only applied to GUIs.
- userbinator 6y agoIt's interesting to compare zip with lzh, which was very popular in Japan; they're both from roughly the same era, yet lzh definitely seems far more logically designed (and often outperformed zip in compression ratio too.)
- onefuncman 6y agofrom my memory, both ARJ and LZH outperformed ZIP for my benchmarks. I used to stripe archives across as many floppy disks as I had until I eventually got a CD writer...
- userbinator 6y agoZIP commonly uses DEFLATE which is LZ with a 32k window + Huffman, whereas LZH went up to LZ with a 64k window + Huffman. I suspect the doubled window alone is responsible for much of the improvement. According to http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/ARJ http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/ARJ , ARJ uses something similar to LZH's lh6 algorithm, which is LZ with a 32k window + Huffman, so the difference could be due to ARJ's reduced file format overhead compared to ZIP, or perhaps slightly better Huffman codes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- geocar 6y ago> But, that contradicts 4.1.9 that says zip files maybe be streamed. If zip files can be streamed then both of the example above would fail because in the first case we'd see file B and in the second we'd see file A (old) before we saw that the central directory doesn't reference them. If you have to wait for the central directory before you can correctly use any of the entries then functionally you can not stream zip files. You cannot filter a particular file in a stream using UNIX fifos and constant memory, but you could replace the old file A with the second file A in the stream because it is later. In this way, yes you can consume a zip file in a streaming way, even if you have to wait until the end to pass any of the output to another process. TAR and CPIO have the same "feature".
- greggman3 6y agoNo you can't because the definition of "streaming" is to use the data as it comes down the wire. So CMD.BAT format disk CMD.BAT rem format disk If the TOC only points to the second CMD.BAT then executing the first one as you stream it is wrong.
- geocar 6y ago> If the TOC only points to the second CMD.BAT then executing the first one as you stream it is wrong. The output directory contains the second CMD.BAT when you're done processing, whether you use the streaming algorithm or you consult the TOC, because in the streaming algorithm you simply overwrite the second CMD.BAT (if you created it as a result of the first CMD.BAT) with the new contents.
- gildas 6y agoOut of curiosity, is there any reason you don't mention zip.js at all in the documentation of unzipit?
- zmodem 6y agoOne big part about your post is about streaming. I don't think the ZIP format was ever designed for streaming, and there are no claims about streaming in the original app notes. Actually, the wording about streaming you refer to were only added to the app note last year, and as you rightly point out, it's not guaranteed to work.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoHere is Phil Katz on the Computer Chronicles TV series: https://archive.org/download/filecompress https://archive.org/download/filecompress
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13148725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13148725 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6602899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6602899
- jdeibele 6y agoIntentionally or not, Phil Katz achieved "embrace, extend, extinguish" with the .ARC format. When his program was compressing it would use a very effective format that was not understood by SEA's program. It still would have the .ARC extension, though. So SEA's program got the reputation of being broken because they wouldn't work on all .ARC files but PKArc would. Also SEA was basically two guys. Their lawyer may have expected PKWare to be a big business but this was a founder versus 2 co-founder dispute. It wasn't Microsoft or Oracle on the other side. It's hard to say what else they should or could have done under the circumstances.
- sedatk 6y agoAccording to SEA founders, he had ripped the source code too, having intact variable names and such. Apparently, first version of PKArc was pretty much ARC with assembly optimizations added.
- superdisk 6y agoA while back I emailed Thom Henderson for the ARC source code and he sent it to me. I planned to port it to Python for kicks but never got around to it...
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoIsn't Python a poor choice of language for computationally intensive code?
- superdisk 6y agoI just wanted to do it to learn how the code works.
- tyingq 6y agoDean Cooper's post on the PkARC vs SEA topic is interesting. He was another person working on an archiver in the same time period. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2398 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2398
- 6y ago
- taw2212121 6y agoHe has my empathy. Never had a problem for most of my life, then got sick in a way that I was given hydrocodone for 8 months. I took more than the label said, a lot more, and at some point a switch clicked over in my head. After the hydrocodone was gone, I switched to alcohol only because it was easy to get. I've been sober a while now, but stopping the drinking was MUCH harder than stopping the hydrocodone. Alcohol is a beast once that circuit breaker trips in your head and you start drinking large quantities daily. It's very hard to explain to someone that hasn't gone through it. Suffice it to say that quitting isn't really about willpower.
- chillwaves 6y ago> Suffice it to say that quitting isn't really about willpower. I found this to be my experience as well, which is why I was so interested when I heard about naltrexone therapy. More specifically, a course known as The Sinclair Method. [1] The idea is to use the drug an hour prior to drinking (and only then, so if you abstained from drinking that day, you would abstain from naltrexone -- this is where it differs from standard naltrexone therapy that would have you take it every morning regardless of your plans to drink). Naltrexone blocks endorphins associated with drinking and helps to reprogram your brain to no longer seek that neurochemical response. I found it to be highly successful the first week -- I didn't even want to finish 2 drinks. After the first week, it still worked but not as well. And I also realized that the anticipation of drinking was almost as powerful as drinking itself, in that I would feel a "rush" even on my way to buy alcohol. It took about 6 months of naltrexone therapy to finally quit. The funny part is, during that time and when under emotional distress, sometimes I would drink without the medication but it still seemed effective in that I never quite got the pleasure I used to have. I'm coming up on 3 months sober, but unlike past attempts to quit, I have no urge to fight and no desire to drink again (and I am going to keep it that way). I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, just my story. The other interesting part to me is how rarely naltrexone is used for problem drinking (vs something like AA, which is faith based in more ways than one), and even more rarely is it deployed the way The Sinclair Method instructs (deliberately, right before drinking). > Over time, your brain learns not to associate alcohol with pleasure, resulting in reduced cravings and improved control over alcohol use. [1] https://www.sinclairmethod.org/what-is-the-sinclair-method-2/ https://www.sinclairmethod.org/what-is-the-sinclair-method-2...
- tra3 6y agoInteresting (and alarming). - Founder of zappos ended up badly just recently. - ReiserFS, Hans Reiser killed his wife. - Security researcher (drawing a blank right now.. Kaspersky maybe?) went off the deep end as well. I feel like a lot of really smart people around me are on the autism spectrum or are somewhat odd. I mean, I've noticed some of the same issues as the subject of the article... social anxiety, tendency to over imbibe. Having said all that, I wonder if there's a prevalence (or distribution?) of certain traits in a population and there are enough IT folks around now where every characteristics is represented. Anyway, sad article. I had no idea.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tachyonbeam 6y agoIt seems like his biggest problem was alcoholism. I don't know that addiction is over-represented among smart people or people on the spectrum. It looks like it can be a vicious cycle though. Abuse alcohol or drugs, make bad decisions, bad decisions have negative consequences, abuse alcohol or drugs again to forget about negative consequences, rinse and repeat. It's a hard cycle to break. Many people can't admit that they have a problem to begin with.
- amelius 6y agoApparently, studies show that IQ and several forms of addiction are positively correlated, [1]. [1] https://vertavahealth.com/blog/correlation-intelligence-addiction/ https://vertavahealth.com/blog/correlation-intelligence-addi...
- girvo 6y agoI’m open about my past Heroin addiction on here, and get a tonne of emails from other HNers. Anecdotally I’ve no idea whether it’s more than should be expected, but a lot of people on here suffer the way I suffered, so it’s definitely an undercurrent at least.
- 6y ago
- reiichiroh 6y agoFor some reason I always preferred ARJ in those days
- fullstop 6y agoIt was useful for multi-volume archives that would fit on floppy disks.
- pacificmint 6y agoAnd utilize them perfectly. Other compression programs would not split a file between two disks, and therefore always leave some unused space. ARJ multi volume archives utilized the floppy capacity to 100%.
- anonymousiam 6y agoI knew that Phil drank himself to death, but I did not know the other tragic details of his life. It's silly that System Enhancement Associates sued him when they themselves had lifed the "LBR" archive format from CP/M, but greater examples of legal travesty exist in computer history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBR_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBR_(file_format) I still have a bought-and-paid-for 3.5" floppy disk of PKZip from PKWare. I am the only one I know who ever actually paid for it.
- rhapsodic 6y ago>I still have a bought-and-paid-for 3.5" floppy disk of PKZip from PKWare. I am the only one I know who ever actually paid for it. I had one too, and I held onto the floppy and the plastic folder it came in for years, until I finally trashed it in a decluttering frenzy. I think the version I registered was 1.10.
- analog31 6y agoIn the late 80s, I bought a perpetual license for PKZip, which I still have in a notebook somewhere. I used it to bundle my own shareware program. Of all the programs, theirs seemed like the one with the most shareware-friendly licensing scheme and user friendly unpacking process. Stupidly, I sent my brother an encrypted ZIP file with my source code, and of course it's the only copy remaining, and of course I can't crack the password. I've tried some cracking programs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- peteretep 6y ago> Just imagine having nobody in your life. Not anybody to call. Nobody. It is hard for me to imagine this. I'm currently following a guy on Twitter who's released from prison recently. While in prison he got an arts scholarship, was a prolific writer and published a _lot_ of magazine and academic articles. He mixes a truly entertaining Twitter feed with naked calls for money, as he has nobody except his small Twitter following to turn to as he tries to rebuild his life. It's heart-breaking. https://twitter.com/PeterJMWayne11 https://twitter.com/PeterJMWayne11
- sam1r 6y agoSorry I truly don’t follow. Naked calls for money? Clicked your link and see an older British gentlemen at glance.
- peteretep 6y ago"naked" here means plain / unadorned
- DoreenMichele 6y agoBasically "asking for a handout" because it's all he's got. There's a lot of that on twitter. I wish I knew how people turned that into money. It's nothing I've ever figured out, though I'm frequently in a pickle financially.
- kalium-xyz 6y agoJust ask the people who you see doing it.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoOh, everyone knows I have a genetic disorder. Most people don't give a damn and I would really rather make it on merit anyway, so that's generally where I try to put my time and effort. I just get frustrated seeing that some people can just say "Hey, world, my life sucks. Wanna cut me a little slack here?" and that sometimes actually works. It doesn't for me. I seem to get actively kicked in the teeth no matter what I do. I've worked my ass off to get healthier to try to make my life work. There's no acknowledgement of that. I get told I'm making that up and insane and a teller of tall tales. Meanwhile, there's also pretty much zero compassion for "Wow, her condition is incurable and doesn't qualify for disability. Sucks to be her!" And if I say anything about the whole thing (on Hacker News), I get downvotes or actively attacked most of the time. If I talk about sexism here, I get attacked for that as well and told that couldn't possibly be a factor in my persistent poverty, no. Being able to rebut ridiculous assertions makes no difference either. They come up with some new excuse to dismiss me and blame me and so on. There's always some excuse why loads of "good people" neither have compassion for my dilemma nor think I deserve an income based on merit. Nor does it work to rebut more general BS and point out the fact that most well-heeled, high paid programmers basically think writers should be slave labor and work for free. They don't want ads on the internet. They don't want tip jars. They don't want pay walls. I used to routinely get told "Get a real job" like I'm just lazy or something, as if writing isn't a real skill with value. Etc. Ad nauseum. I just would like this ferris wheel to stop so I can get off of it. But that seems impossible as well. I know for an absolute fact that some of the amazingly shitty, abusive people I have tried to walk away from still cyberstalk me. What the world has historically done to people like me is murder them. Pointing out the undeniably bad behavior of other people doesn't remedy it. They kill people for that rather than take a look in the mirror and go "They're right. I am doing that and it's wrong. I should do something else." And I don't know how to somehow magically just not be me. I didn't choose this. This isn't remotely the life I want. I pretty much basically want anything else but this. If I could make it as a waitress who never spent another minute online, I would do that in a heartbeat, but I can't because of my genetic disorder. That's just not possible. I don't want to be telling people "You're full of crap and you make it impossible for people like me to make their lives work." I just don't have some way out of A. being me and B. the sucktastic fact that my life simply doesn't work and a large part of the reason for that is because "hell is other people." And I don't really want to be leaving this comment either, but I don't know what else to do. It's "wrong" and "bad" to speak my mind on such subjects but silence doesn't change anything. Trying to say nothing about the issues I see and just trying to forge ahead and make it on merit doesn't get me anywhere. All it does is put me in a psychological pressure cooker that threatens my sanity. It's a form of gaslighting for the world to make it abundantly clear that talking about how I experience life is Verboten because it makes other people uncomfortable.
- rblatz 6y agoI actually crossed paths early in my career with Steve Burg VP of Engineering at PKSoft and quoted in this story. It was in the early 2000s shortly after Phil’s death. He had taken it very hard and had gotten really into fitness as part of his coping mechanism. Ended up starting a chain of really top of the line gyms in Dayton Ohio. I actually worked out of the back office of one of the gyms for a while working for one of Steve’s buddies. I wouldn’t characterize Phil as having no friends, at least from the little I knew of Steve.
- atdrummond 6y agoHis issue wasn’t a lack of friends. His problem, which lead to alcoholism, was explained to me by his former colleagues, primarily Doug Hay. Katz turned to his mother for comfort following Walter’s death. Unfortunately for him and his firm, he received none. His buy-out of her shares was a poorly communicated effort to remove the business from between them and to attempt to salvage their familial bond. Hildegard instead saw it as a financial assault on herself and resorted to communicating with her own son through lawyers, even after the transaction was completed. This piece paints her with typical maternal instinct and filial interest despite evidence neither existed once she saw her son’s ability to write, and then subsequently delete, her financial future. Given her reputation was well known I struggle to understand why she was repeatedly given this benefit of the doubt.
- watwut 6y ago> His buy-out of her shares was a poorly communicated effort to remove the business from between them and to attempt to salvage their familial bond. Hildegard instead saw it as a financial assault on herself and resorted to communicating with her own son through lawyers, even after the transaction was completed. Of course the action did not worked to salvage communication between them? How can one possibly expect better communication after hostile buyout and firing? Whatever her flaws as mother, the subsequent communication only through layers after that seems to me as not just expected, but even reasonable. I mean, him doing that might have been rational business decision if she was doing job badly, I dont want to judge that. But expecting the relationships to improve after that sounds completely absurd.
- wmij 6y agoI knew about the story of Phil Katz having read this article before and was also a user back in the day, but just recently watched the movie 'Leaving Las Vegas'. Reading the PK article again in the link reminded me so much about the movie. If you haven't seen the movie it's worth watching and maybe an insight into the problems he was going through.
- bjornsing 6y agoSon starts company. Mom somehow gets a job there and 25%. People start saying things like "It was his product, but it was her business." That mother-son relationship feels a bit off...
- anaisbetts 6y ago> "He lived in a state of paranoia," says one former employee, who asked not to be identified. "He thought that (WITI-TV Channel 6) across the street from us was watching him." This very much sounds like someone using alcohol to self-medicate their schizophrenia. In a better world doctors would've caught this and treated it appropriately
- burrows 6y agoYeah, you’d have to be crazy to think that media companies are spying on you.
- dusted 6y agoIf anyone is interested, there is more information on the PKware / SEA story here, http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/SEA/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/S... Also the BBS Documentary itself is worth a view.