I'd be the first to admit I was bleary eyed that night. Being up way too late has become a habit of mine since I have started working 50% of the time from home. Constantly finding work things to do is a good thing for the company I work for, but sometimes is a bad thing for my eyes.

"One more e-mail message," I mumbled to myself.

The e-mail message in question was the cNet Shareware Dispatch for the week.

"Why do I get this?"

I hardly ever read it. I mostly open it, glance at it and delete it. This night was no exception except something caught my eye. You know the kind of things you scan in e-mail quickly, but your brain is delayed in a couple of seconds in putting the pieces together.

What caught my eye was this:

"It is with sadness that we mourn the passing of Phillip Katz, a pioneer in the world of shareware. Creator of PKZip, he invented the ZIP format which made widespread shareware distribution via the Internet possible."

For those of you just joining the PC revolution, ZIP is used to compress, squeeze, files, so that when you send them across the Internet or store them on your hard drive they take up less space than the original. It's like storing a 6 pack in the space of a 3 pack.

Phil Katz created ZIP. There's some neat history there, but I get ahead of myself. I tried ardently to confirm the story, but no tech sites were covering it. I even went to his company's page and there was no mention. A little odd, but then again why would you want to announce the man who created your company was dead?

I used the Deja service to post a message on Usenet (alt.comp.compression and comp.compression). I thought for sure that the members of these online communities would know the truth. My message basically said I saw the announcement and wanted to know if anyone could confirm.

As I hit the sent key I realized I could find out A) Where PKWare was located and B) See if the local paper had a notice of his death. Surprise of all surprises, the local newspaper had a small blurb about Phil Katz's passing. It's really an obit. I thought this was really odd given Phil Katz's contribution to computing and the fact his company was located in this city. I posted another message on Usenet letting everyone know that yes, I confirmed Phil Katz's passing.

Phil Katz's death was really a bummer for me. See, I was at the epicenter of the birth of Phil's compression programs. Ha, right now you are saying to yourself, "He made a mistake, he said programs." Yes, I did. Phil Katz really created three compression programs all together.

Way back in the days of the BBS people like you and me dialed into a computer connected to a phone line. Typically, these computers only supported one phone line and went less than 9.6k.

We would send e-mail to our friends, but the e-mail wasn't as global or connected as it is today. You and your friend had to be on the same network. Imagine that only Yahoo users could send mail to Yahoo users and Excite users could only send mail to Excite users.

We would play games against the computer. Some of my favorite were trivia games or TradeWars.

We could talk to the Sysop, that is the person whose computer we were using. Talk is too advanced of a word. Type in chat mode is more like it.

What I loved doing the most, though, was downloading files. Shareware and freeware. The world seemed to open up from your local BBS connection and files from people across the country would come in. Since the speed of the transfer was very slow, people compressed the files with a program called ARC by Systems Enhancements Associates (SEA). ARC would take the original files and compress them into one file with the extension of ARC. When you downloaded this file from the BBS you unarced it by using ARC.EXE. This was great until a gentleman named Phil Katz came up with the idea of improving ARC.

See, Phil found out you could speed the compression process and even make the files more compressed. Instead of one file for compression and decompression, Phil made two. The result was PKARC for compression and PKXARC for decompression. This is where the fun began.

SEA got really ticked that Phil had done a better job of compression and decompression while maintaining compatibility. In the great American way, instead of competing and making ARC better, they sued. Sysops of the world revolted. Diatribes were posted against SEA. In a single year more sysops converted to Phil's program rather than SEA's.

Phil Katz, seeing that a protracted legal battle would waste money and resources, decided to change his code and work on his own compression scheme. Phil release PKPAK and PKUNPAK. Here is where my memory gets fuzzy. I think PKPAK had its own compression algorithm in addition to handling ARC. Phil also let everyone know he was working on a new compression standard that would be way better than anyone could ever dream of.

As a side note, all this happened in 1988-1989. I spent over an hour searching for a text file or web page that gave the history of this and I couldn't find one. The closest I came was the MIT Jargon page (search for ARC wars). I searched everywhere. I even went to Channel 1, the best BBS in the world, and couldn't find any text files concerning this. It amazed me, because at the time there were literally hundreds of text files talking about this. I want to do a complete history of this in memory of Phil Katz, so if you can help me, please e-mail Patrick Grote.

A few months later, PKZIP was released and that was it. I can't find a Systems Enhancement Associates website, but PKWare is still in business. Sysops dropped almost every other compression type and went with ZIP and as they say, that is history.

Fast forward to Phil's death and you can appreciate my concern and surprise of his death. I posted the little news I had to SlashDot thinking that as a collective group of tech heads, someone would know something. My post was killed.

For a couple of days nothing was mentioned about Phil's death anywhere. A Usenet reader posted a follow-up article that appeared in the local paper, but that was it. It seemed like no one noticed. That is until ABCNews posted a front page news item on his death.

Of course, this started the floodgates. Someone dies, no big deal. They die in a surprising shocking way, let's make it national news. I was ticked.

To my shock, SlashDot then posted the news article. I had let them know the day he died and they waited for the salacious details. So much for the brothers and sisters in the tech community having a heart. As the comments flowed under the news headline, someone pointed out that Phil Katz appears on a list of the local sheriffs's most wanted list.

Two thoughts have captured my attention after all this happened:

What happens to history in computing?

Shouldn't the Internet be used to memorialize those who helped it gain a popular foothold?

The Arc Wars were real. They happened. I dare say it was the first market shift based on consumer choice that happened in the PC world. Do we have a written history of this? Is it documented somewhere? Should it be? Will we forget the Microsoft/Netscape Wars? How about the AOL/CompuServe Wars? What about the non-wars? The embrace of the HTTP standard. The web design evolution?

And what about those who got us here? Sure, Phil Katz didn't invent file compression. He didn't even create the basic algorithm used in ZIPs. What he did was make it so people could transfer files in a standard method across multiple platforms. That is big. Very big in today's Internet. Shouldn't an online site be dedicated to these folks who have made a difference and are not part of our computing culture anymore?

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