#I found pkware on my phone software

'If I were a physician as I am now when I was 18, I would have known what to do with that note,' Fedderly says. May a calculator bring great happiness to you.' 'I hope your future is bright and your life is happy (if possible). 'I enjoyed working with you in mathematics and physics classes through the four terrible, long, unbearable, tortuous, but wonderful years at Nicolet,' Katz wrote. He was short, and, well I don't want to say homely, so I'll say he was plain looking.'ДЄfter hearing of Katz's death, Ray Fedderly, a Milwaukee cardiologist who sat next to Katz in high school honors math and physics classes, opened his high school yearbook and found an angst-ridden message. 'He was an outcast, definitely someone who was picked on,' says Rick Mayer, who graduated with Katz. Phil Katz was a quiet, asthmatic child whose athletic pursuits as a kid went no further than riding dirt bikes in his Glendale neighborhood.ДЄ 1980 graduate of Nicolet High School, Katz was a 'geek' long before that term was linked with dot-com companies and piles of money. 'Just imagine having nobody in your life. I mean, a true friend,' says Chastity Fischer, an exotic dancer who often spent time with Katz and was one of the last people to see him alive. 'This guy did not have one friend in the world. Desperate to avoid warrants for his arrest, he bounced between cheap hotels near the airport. Katz owned a condominium in Mequon but rarely stayed there. Toward the end, Katz worked only sporadically, firing up his computer late at night, while filling his days with prodigious bouts of drinking and trysts with exotic dancers.

#I found pkware on my phone software

His compression software helped set a standard so widespread that 'zipping' - compressing a file - became a part of the lexicon of PC users worldwide.Д«ut the riches his genius produced were no balm for what had become a hellish life of paranoia, booze and strip clubs.

Katz's inventions shrink computer files 50% to 70% to conserve precious space on hard disks. It was an ignominious end for a man who created one of the most influential pieces of software in the world - PKZip - and it attracted the attention not only of the techno-faithful but of the mainstream press across the nation. He was alone, estranged long ago from his family and a virtual stranger to employees of his own company, PKWare Inc. The genius who built a multimillion-dollar software company known worldwide for its pioneering 'zip' files had died of acute pancreatic bleeding caused by chronic alcoholism. Phil Katz, shown in 1994, holds a computer disk containing compression software made by his company, PKWare Inc. Then he was found dead April 14, Phil Katz was slumped against a nightstand in a south side hotel, cradling an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps.

Of the Journal Sentinel staff Last Updated: May 21, 2000 The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz By Lee Hawkins Jr.