The Dark History of Zip Files
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- The life and death of Phil Katz, inventor of the PKZIP format, as told by Dave Plummer, the creator of ZIPFolders for Windows. For information on my book, "Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire":
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Please note that due to a lack of documentary original images, this video makes use of stock video and similar photos/videos to illustrate the story.
Image Credit: Wall Street Journal, www.wsj.com/ar...
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No one has ever 'deadpanned' something so eloquently as your "I swear on my Bible" quote.
Edit: I may stand corrected with that "so waiting for bottom is not an advisable strategy". Great review of Phil Katz' history and that sad end. Great 'non deadpan' take and helping expose the tragedy of alcoholism and alcohol abuse in general. So much damage, so much denial.
Thanks for the kind words!
@@DavesGarage You're welcome Dave. Great channel, I hope to allot more time to be able to watch more. Take care.
@@DavesGarage Damn i should get into alcohol.
The guy must have been returded.
Such a sensitive expository description of both the program and the inventor is so illuminating. The spotlight shows the pitfalls and dangers of life while paradoxically one is excelling at some venture. Listening to this is strong medicine for many such a life.... CEB
Back in the late 80s, a power spike trashed my PC's hard drive while it was updating a floppy-based archive file containing all of my business financial records. The overwritten file, my only backup, was corrupted. The hard drive had been reduced to a whirring mass of iron oxide particles. It was absolutely the worst-case scenario.
I was doomed. I called PKWARE and Phil himself answered the phone. He told me to make a diskcopy of the trashed diskette and send it to him. I did so, via Federal Express, along with a check for $100.
Phil hadn't asked for any money, but I figured it couldn't hurt. Two days later, the Fedex guy rang the doorbell. I grabbed the envelope from him, dashed to my office, stuck the floppy in my replacement machine and saw, much to my relief, that my financial files were intact. Another look inside the envelope revealed a registered version of the software and a hand written note from Phil admonishing me to be more careful in the future.
That's how I'll remember Phil.
Hopefully you still have a copy of that letter. Some sort of tech history museum would probably LOVE to get their hands on it and share it with the world. I'd pay money to go see it!
You replaced. Your entire machine. Over a storage device issue.
@@bootmii98 It was an older machine (pre-386) and made more sense to replace than put in a new hard drive, which were rather pricey back then.
@@1KGB Kids these days.
@@TheOtherBradBird Hahahah I guess the disposable tech era started much earlier than the 2000's, then again 286 machines were rapidly made obsolete, not to mention their unreliable power delivery.
When I was a young programmer, I discovered that alcohol made being around people much easier. I went way over the line so many times I ended up with a lot of bad habits. The freedom I enjoy today was hard won and only exists because I am constantly vigilant. Given the right stresses I could slip back in a second. My best friend couldn't pull out of it and died young. People need to hear stories like these. Stay strong and thanks for sharing.
Same here. Alcohol and coke "helped" me work and be social. AA saved my life - but AA isn't the only way, and anything that gets someone out of that be it self help or a program or just vigilance.
I was never (and am still not) a particularly social person: I survived the COVID lockdowns with relative ease since my wife and I really aren't the kind of people who need to have others around all the time. Working from home? Pfft ... I did that for twenty+ years as a contract developer even before starting my current full-time job.
I'm in my sixties now, but when I started programming in the mid-seventies, I never turned to alcohol to help me fit in. First, as someone who was trying to use his intellect make a living it made no sense to dull my thinking processes, and secondly drinking never had much effect on me unless I drank an insane amount.
Decades later my doctor told me research had determined that some people's livers metabolize alcohol at an accelerated pace, and that I was likely one of those people. Consequently drinking (other than as a strictly social affair) is of little use to me. Too bad I suppose, but the effects just don't last long enough to be worth the effort.
One of my best friends, on the other hand, is an end-stage alcoholic. He was on the way out when his sister and brother-in-law finally got him to go for the inpatient therapy he so desperately needed. And it took:, he's been dry for nearly twenty years because he was made to realize, down at some deep level, that he simply cannot drink, and that if he starts he will die.
Too right! I'm presently pulling up on methadone ... and trying to complete a research degree. This video really gave me some extra motivation to not waste the chance(s) to do something really special with my life.
Helps the party animal come out at parties. Alcoholic spirit used to summon party demons
@@whitenuttergoku7310 Isn't "alcoholic spirit" a tautology? Hehe 😜
This is a hard story to tell without demonizing someone. You covered the good, the bad, and the very ugly while making Phil relatable on a human level. Excellent job!
my thoughts also .. great vid
Seconded. The internet has a way of completely forgetting the *human* in a human - especially one so far removed in time. Can't hurt remembering there are actually very, very few people with zero redeeming, or at the very least relatable, qualities.
I agree.
I totally agree. And also think it is good that he included the hotline number where to get help.
Yeah, when it comes to substance abuse people can sometimes become so removed from what is seen as “normal” that it becomes very easy to dehumanize them and see them as a lost cause.
I think it’s important to remember that nobody starts off wanting to be an addict or a “lost cause” and in many cases it is just normal people who didn’t know what they were getting into. Whether it’s starting off with a prescription or just some partying, addiction is something that really creeps up on you and by the time you know you’re too deep in it
Thanks Dave. That was well done, and told a story that people interested in computing history should know. I especially appreciate your props to David Huffman. To really solve a problem like that, and then prove that your solution / proof is optimal is an incredible intellectual triumph. More people should know his name.
Dave, Thanks for the well-done piece on Phil Katz. I knew the software well but never got the full story on what became of Phil.
I was the author of LU, Library Utility, that could pack small files into big ones, on the CP/M OS. It was used by a number of CP/M BBSes. It did no compression, so you had to squish stuff before adding it, but otherwise ticked the boxes for getting a whole package transmitted without losing pieces.
Yep, used LU on both CP/M as well as MS-DOS. SEA certainly didn't create the concept!
Growing up with DOS and zip files, I never knew the tragic history of its innovator, other than his name. This is very enlightening, great video!
I ran a Fidonet BBS in Tacoma in the early to late 90's, I was not familiar with this story. Zip was everything, the file downloads, yes, but even more important was the nightly echo and netmail transfers. Thousands of messages would be "tossed" to their echo using squish or gecho or fmail, and then the callers would bundle up their subscribed echos for offline reading, done by zip. Along came pak and arj and rar and others, but zip was alwas king after the brief arc stint. This was really a good episode, brought back so many memories.
I ran a simple messaging BBS in '85 and '86 on a TRS-80 Model III. I wrote the software in BASIC. I only had a dumb modem, so I bought a TI (phone) ring detector IC from Radio Shack, ran its square wave output to a TTL input on the Trash-80 to see that the phone was ringing, used another TTL output to energize a reed relay to take the "phone off the hook".
Being a geek from the 8-bit days and a recovering alcoholic myself I strongly relate to this story and thank you for presenting it very fairly and compassionately. I've always felt that we nerds are in general very susceptible to substance abuse issues. We are most often very socially challenged individuals who find comfort and peace in the orderly, predictable and controllable world of technology. The chaotic, emotional erratic world in which we must function is quite overwhelming much of the time. It becomes difficult to shut down the mind that needs understanding and order, trying to process things that seem so completely confusing leading to feelings of overstimulation and exhaustion. When all of these factors are combined with a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism and substance abuse we have the perfect storm for issues. It's great to be sober but I did have to learn how. I still love my 8-bit technology. Arduino anyone?
Thx Dave. Phil was a friend of mine. He & I would talk regularly over compuserve. He helped me learn & fix code many times. I lived through this story & when he passed, it truly shook my life. I've missed him many times. Thank you Phil for friendship.
Challenge: what was the correct response to the Fidonet "YOOHOO" handshake? I nearly died laughing when I was reading through some logs on my 4-line BBS. Love this sort of deep dive history by someone who was there, even writing the code. You must feel somewhat proud of how many computers your code it running on! Cheers!
Seems like the community really appreciated Phil’s business model - compressing files costs bank but decompressing is free…genius. He won the hearts and minds.
This is such a sad story to hear about
It's been years since I've had anything to drink
I love the connection all your stories seem to make with reality and then there's stuff like this, that really just gets to the point
Thanks for the history. These damn kids today need to know more of it.
Dave as one of the co-coordinators of FidoNet and then AlterNet, this video bought back memories of $4k phones bills in the 80's and knowing Thom Henderson and the ARC/PKArc saga. I do recall some of Phil's enhancements while making it faster also cut some corners leading to more that a few disk corruptions. Your right the "community" did view the suite as evil, but anyone who knows Thom knows otherwise. Sad to see how Phil ended his days, makes me wonder about some of my peers from those FightONet days 🙂 Again keep up these great video's I am surely not the only one who these videos are bringing back memories of simpler times.
1:55 I saw that and instantly thought, Computer Chronicles. Yes, Phil Katz is in the 1991 File Compression episode, on RUclips.
I bought both SEA and PKWare's products, and used them for my BBS - TECH-LINK. With my location between Washington and Baltimore, my FIDO node passed a lot of info between those LATAs. In those days, it was considered 'goash' to charge for BBS access, so I funded it all myself. Running on my TRS80, I used a manual answer modem, that I engineered a software/hardware solution converting it to auto-answer.
Wish I could have talked to you beforehand! I briefly ran a BBS in the 80s, but never a Fidonet node!
This is the kind of story I want the youtube algorithm to feed me. I know zip, I even used pkzip back in the old DOS days, but i never heard of Phil Katz and his tragic end of life.
Thank you for the help and the story on PKZIP and Phil Katz.
I worked at PKWARE from 1990-2009. Phil hired me personally and I’d like to consider him a close friend. He really was a good person and troubled. But the stories that happened there would make an amazing movie.
Well done. As a recovering addict I really appreciate your info on same. I hope it helps someone or at least keeps the issue in the public domain.
I owned/ran one of those BBS's for years. PKZip was a godsend.
Back around 2000, I was at a Black Angus restaurant and they had this trivia game where questions would flash on video displays around the bar and you answered with a cordless keyboard. It was fun and to this day, I miss it. I forgot what it was called. NTC? Anyway, I was there when the system shut down for the night. To my surprise, the PKARC splash screen came up. This was like 11 or 12 years after SEA vs. PKWARE lawsuit happened.
Wow. What a timewarp! I still remember when I made the switch from ARC to ZIP! You should cover the evolution of transfer protocols such as xmodem, ymodem and zmodem! Cheers!
I remember using 7-plus and LZH, on the World Wide Amateur Radio Packet Net, My Father had an HF (300bd) and satellite (1200 bd) station with a BBS running F6FBB software. I built a radio repeater node called POG to connect (at 1200bd) Dads system to a Local but over a mountain BBS in a large town, they then connected at midnight to a nation wide UHF inter connect link to update all the other BB's at 9600bd. This is in New Zealand. Dad had a phone line for dial in, but it was rarely used as he was a rural call. His computer system was a multi Z80 S100 Buss system later upgraded to 80286, and 80386, with 5 processors. All home made. When Phil Karn invented TCP-IP, is when Dad got his first IBM PC. About then we added PKZip to the encoding ability of the system. When I was learning Pascal, I wrote a series of compactor programs, for test credits, The only one I wrote that came close to ZIP, used a Bubble sort position encrypted octal number encoder, I did try using big-endian vs little-endian sorts, but it only made a difference on some files. If I was to do it today I think the amount of memory and power available in computers would allow the one greater type of concentration, namely the 3 dimensional bit placer with equations made on the total file, creating an image of sorts. Any way good story about Phil Katz, you have a great voice I'm sure you could work in Hollywood or where ever cartoons are made as voiceover.
Thank you for presenting this. I had known Phil Katz for a while (via email) in the early 90's before he started going wonky.....sad demise to a smart guy.
Thanks Dave. It's good to remember others and their contributions to our lives both in the past and today, no matter how large or small they might have been.
Btw- I really have been enjoying your channel for the past few years. I don't think you or I ever crossed paths at work or otherwise, but your stories bring back a lot of fond memories. :)
Thank you!
Jason Scott talked my ears off about this years ago at a DEFCON. It was awesome.
You avoided sensationalism while highlighting a serious problem. And, reintroduced a seminal figure in personal computing. Thank you.
First video to actually make me like and subscribe on the spot. Thank you so much for all your insight from that era, and for making the stories very fascinating.
I've implemented both Huffman encoding and arithmetic encoding, and arithmetic encoding is at least 10% better. The reasons people didn't use arithmetic encoding back in the heydays was because it was patented. Of course, either of those alone isn't very good, so they're preceded by dictionary and sliding window methods that look for patterns. Then the entropy compression is used as a final stage to basically do efficient bit packing.
RLE for the win.
Good on you for including the message about alcoholism at the end.
"Chronic" = has been occurring for years
"acute" = is a recent developement, localized in time
for anyone wondering how you die of an 'acute' bleeding. In Medicine it is just a way to contrast to a long term injury/sickness and one caused by injury or has recently developed
I hosted a BBS from my home in the early 90's. All it took was a spare computer and an additional phone line (i had two). Never had a lot of traffic, it was just a fun thing to do.
You earned your like with this sensitively told tale!
"I prefer s-e-a over sea". Proceeds to use them interchangeably
You know you've hit "Rock Bottom" when you stop digging.
Most people won't be willing to quit until they have encountered enough pain which encourages them to do so.
AA works, if you work it.
Big Book Harry, 5/23/06
I like these "history of" videos. It would be nice to see one on the .mp3 format.
When I had an unpaid secondment to train as an analyst in a FTSE company I struggled to cope with how fast I was learning to how fast the department was depending totally on me. I ended up breaking down because I refused to use drugs or start drinking. Everyone was amazed how long I lasted without ( additional outside help ). When I returned to work they paid me the full wage and all the additional benefits that came with it. And hey I gave drink a try and wish I hadn't as it went right out of control very quickly. It got to the point I was finding code I had written while high and couldn't work out how I did stuff. I eventually left the company after making my way through low level girls from the call centre floor and got many pregnant and cost me my family. Just because someone turned 8 hours of work into 10 min of work shouldn't mean companies keep piling the work on. I walked away from the industry 2 years ago and just got a job that means nothing. I am much happier and calm. I don't need Friday to be so insane that it's Sunday evening before I get home anymore. If I do something code based it's out of interest now rather than to stay on top of my game. It's much better plowing a field on a farm than it is to spent years knee deep in booze and banging call centre girls 2 at a time.
I came into the BBS community just after Katz' death. I didn't know the story at all, just heard whispers of the past conflict with SEA over FidoNet Echos. By then, most of my local BBSen used enough different compression tools that most had automatic compression converters you could run to get a file in whatever format you wanted. PKZip was a standard, but ARJ was better so long as you were on a dos machine, but you'd see files in a rainbow by then - .pak, .arc, .ace, even .lhz came over from the Amiga world. The rare Mac users were all about the confusingly-name .sea format and the non-self-extracting .sit companion.
Just looking at the list of formats on wikipedia takes me back. I'd forgotten all about .arj, despite it being the local winner in the mid 90s...
Don't remember if there were any significant gains in compressed size, but ARJ won me over on ease of use.
I used PKZIP all the time back in the day. Before 32GB USB drives were commonplace, being able to compress a large folder and store it on multiple floppies was a godsend. I never actually bought PKZIP, and I'm not sure if the version I had was the shareware version or the retail one. Perhaps I can feel slightly less guilty about that knowing I wasn't contributing to his alcohol abuse.
Oh yeah, long nights dialing up the local BBS with a 300 baud modem ... good times. I think I still have hundreds of old 5 1/4" shareware floppies, somewhere.
Very interesting. And I like that you gave that bit of advice at the end re alcoholism.
For me, the biggest irony was the fact that LHA format came out (within a time period that was still close enough to be a reasonable alternative) and was "enough better" that I felt, it should really have supplanted ZIP. But because Microsoft adopted ZIP, LHA failed to catch on big enough to supplant it. The biggest difference was that LHA could compress some graphics files that ZIP would essentially just ignore. But I would guess that Microsoft (and maybe the general public) got tired of the constant changes in file formats and having to support yet another one. Something like that. . . .
Well done Dave. Told brilliantly..
I loved the speed of PKZIP back in the day. There were much better compression utilities for reducing time dialing a BBS, but PKZIP was just fast and worked..
Is the new Ark program found on most Linux distros today the same as the old Ark program that you talked about?
I used to an an alchoholic, I had no idea it was bad for you.
Nice job Dave.
cant remember the name of it...a command line utility that supported many formats and it's own new format (arj). it had an indispensable feature to split (and later combine) the archive over several floppy disks of size of your choosing.
Hard stuff! Thank you Dave
The thing that sticks out to me is that ARC & ZIP fought over money, yet the bloke from MIT who's work they used got nothing!
If you mean Huffman, his algorithm was too trivial to be patented; if you mean Lempel and Ziv, they got a f*ton of money in royalties via GIF, faxes, etc.
Dave, I used to use an archiver back in the day called ARJ, I think it was by Robert K Jung. As I recall, it was a pretty popular successor to the ARC format, but I do also recall the PKZIP program coming into popularity as well. Any insight on what was so unique w/ Robert Jung and his ARJ format? It seems like one thing it had (at the time at least) was the ability to span multiple volumes, something I know ZIP eventually did as well.
THis was a really interesting posting, and a nice tribute to a man who clearly had a very troubled life. Sad ending for one who made such a significant contribution.
The spanning of multiple volumes and it's other backup capabilities where what made it fantastic. Pkzip wasn't as extensive (actually I can't think of another archiver even now that natively supported as many useful backup options).
I have that very same Commodore branded ITT phone! I only bought mine five years ago however.
I'm gonna just set aside the fact that he stole most of the source for zip... and listen to the human side of his story. And now that I have, I feel sorry for Phil, regardless of his achievements or the shortcuts early on, he was still a human being and I'm sorry to hear that he fell into alcoholism and drug use and fell apart. Thanks for sharing another side of Phil Katz.
What was copied was the source for a better ARC program. After being sued and losing in court he built his own format that was smaller and quickly adapted. I don't think that any of the ARC code was in ZIP as if it were he'd have been sued again. SEA was of the opinion that compression couldn't get better, whoops!
(Modern) ZIP is based on LHA which was a freeware invented in Japan.
I love your channel so much
my whole life im just now finding you on youtube are you kidding me
man listening to you is great
Thanks for telling another story I never knew of back then.
Good subject matter. I didn't know this.
Don't really like this story, I was lucky, I have been sober for 15 years, was a though.
wow, thanks for sharing this incredible story and information.
11:55 - that looks like a modern-ish TV by the window.When is that photo from?
Human after all. Touching story. thanks.
Very interesting video, thanks!
I like you're style !
I remember the transition from ARC to ZIP, but I never knew the story behind it.
Phil Katz.... PKZip - 30 years later know what the PK meant...
Well done Dave.
Phil was a brilliant man, however could be bull headed to his own demise. He refused to port PKZip to windows at first because he hated windows, but all that did was open it up for competitors to take over the market (like winzip etc).
What a tragic tale... So sad.
Oh my god!! BBSing days.. My childhood... Good ol days..
I'm not gonna lie, the intro to this hooked me good, but the rest of the video was mostly an old guy talking monotone into the camera. Moo.
1:05 Time traveller Mudahar. I knew it. he did some pastic surg and started some ordinary gamers shortly after. 1:05
I love a good beer, but I won't be doing any coding thereafter, which is a good thing because I love coding more than beer, and so I don't drink much beer.
iF the Baud Rate could be upped to 1152000 might have made for a faster connection.
This is not unlike what happens to lottery winners. The windfall wealth and sometimes fame can really destroy a person. Of course, we all think it wouldn't happen to us. But statistically you would be wrong.
Ooo ooo do ReiserFS and Hans Reiser next
The only time I ever drink is in celebration. Like when Mar-A-Lago got searched by the FBI.. I polished 4 bottles of sparkling wine. Since then I've replaced them with 6 bottles and they're on the ready for tRump's inevitable indictment. Let the good times roll baby!!
Thanks for the video.
I will now always view zip files differently, i.e. with much more respect.
Dave as Phil's ex brother in law thanks for the concise decription of his life.
My condolences, get therapy if you haven't, it affects deeply the immediate family and friends. He gave us ZIP Format and could have been a great Light for programers, he needed further Therapy and support, probably lifetime, but Therapy can make people better for sure, over the long run. Cheers mate
I will keep your family in my prayers
Did Phil ever regret stealing the ARC source code and painting SEA as a "corporate enemy"? BBS The Documentary shows SEA's solo programmer crying because Phil's theft and lies ruined him.
@@MyAmazingUsername Well, the ARC programmer, wasn't an addict, didn't follow the torturous road of an addict, kept doing his work, and finally sold his tech to a Japanese, not an US company, and probably made good money, he could have started over, get a job anywhere; Phil was being tortured to death; I think Phil got punished way more than enough
@@MyAmazingUsername Sea was warm and happy with the program they were selling and the money they were making. Like everything in the computer world improve or die. Phil built a better mouse trap and the people that needed it liked the faster speed of the Pkware ARC program. To settle the lawsuit PKware paid sea lots of money, which they accepted so there was nothing for him regret. I think the regret was on Sea's part they misjudged Phil and the market. Phil had secured a agreement with the largest bulletin board in the world at the time ExcPC to convert all of its files from ARC to the new ZIP format after the settlement. That sealed Sea's Arc programs fate.
Speaking from experience, having two brothers drink themselves to death, I can say that alcoholism affects not only the individual but family and friends too. It's also one of the slowest, nastiest and painful ways to die. One brother died of total organ failure. The other died of uncontrollable internal bleeding.
I am a recovering Meth/Heroin addict and one of the biggest revelations when my addiction finally caught up with me was that addiction effects EVERYONE around you, whether you know them or not. I caused an accident that claimed a young woman's life. It was then I realized how wrong I was. I always thought my addiction was my problem and that I was only hurting myself, but I was so very wrong that night. To any addicts reading this, PLEASE remember your problems do affect other people's lives. Get help before it's too late, please. The shame and regret I feel is indescribable. I wish I had listened sooner and got more help. It's not too late for you to get clean!
Very sorry for your loss too. Alcohol is extremely dangerous. With my addiction, I can at least kind of run from it... But alcohol? That stuff is everywhere. I have always felt extreme sympathy for alcoholics simply because of this.
It's also a contagious disease. For 4 years I was with a woman who is an alcoholic. She hid it long enough for me to fall in love and move in. It was so depressing watching her suffer I started to drink heavily myself. Any threats of leaving her or not supporting her hair just brought accusations and guilt.
Total organ failure and uncontrollable internal bleeding, jesus. I knew you could drink yourself to death but I had no idea this is what that meant, how grizzly. My condolences for your losses.
Got a brother who's an alcoholic and a drug addict. We've tried numerous times to sober him up, and we often get really close too, but then he'd find new friends that are just like him, or jobs that are run by alcoholics, and he'd go right back to where he was. Just like a cycle.
...After a while I just stopped caring about it and moved-on. Though, my mom still tries.
@@madezra64 Alcohol is amazingly destructive, and one of the most addictive drugs, not far from heroin...
And like you said, it is available everywhere!
I have problems with alcohol, i could stop for it for 4 years after a spiritual experience with Wachuma, but i got problems in my life at 2017 (ok, not an excuse, but also an excuse, most people don't know that addiction normally follow psychological problems, i was always strong to addiction, but got depressed and depressive people normally have problem with dopamine, which alcohol looks like an easy solution) and began again, and i still struggling to try to stop it... I'm drinking less and less, but one moment i felt i was going to die...
Most people don't know how an addiction begins, so let me tell people, an alcoholic is not necessarily someone that drinks a lot of alcohol, it is someone that CAN'T stop drinking... It was too late for me when i noticed that drinking few beers today only to be sure that i would have beers the next day was a sign of alcoholism... Lot of people simple "can't" stop drinking, and they think they are alright because "at least i'm not drinking a lot"... NO!!! ONCE AGAIN, if you CAN'T stop drinking and strategize ways to have drinks always available, you are becoming (or already are) alcoholic!
I had some goth/punk friends that started a small ISP and BBS. They rented an office because it already had a phone system installed, so they could set up a server which supported multiple modem connections. Over time they branched out into providing ISP service and web hosting.
I had no idea about this. They were just some guys I hung out with on weekends.
Then all the sudden they were all moderately wealthy, heaving sold their ISP/webhost to some big company.
Most of them were not very wise with their new found wealth, being in their early 20's.
They were part of my alcoholic social scene. I was often over at their house, and they at mine.
Frequently they would buy $100+ of liquor to make some elaborate mixed drinks and everyone would get blotto.
It took me another 15 years of drinking myself blind before my health started getting so bad I had to quit.
Been sober 13 years.
Sadly there is no handbook on how to be wealthy.. and safe.
I worked at BetterNet here in Austfailure, we provided dial up internet access @28.8kbps and eventually 56k (using webexcell modems as they were one of the few devices that could actually TX @ 56k, the originals being Banksia modems that we sold off to customers as part of our upgrade before the digital multiplexing pre adsl days) I got my job at BetterNet by writing the command and control software that ran the internet café out front (Lock & unlock workstations, show a timer/cost indication on the client machines, and all linked using TCP/IP sockets, and written in VB6) this proved my worth to the guy who owned BetterNet, I was offered a traineeship and due to laws about people seeking work being required to accept "any suitable work" I was employed for at least 12 months @ 5.90$ an hour while charging out my work for 66$ an hour, I can tell you there were no shortages of drugs in my workplace altho coming to work while "high" was highly frowned upon. I still battle addiction to this day, but I ask you, do they medicate ADHD under the public health system in your country? (Actually now I question if the Banksia modems were 33.6 but I think it was 28.8kbps)
I lived through everything you talked about. Started with an acoustic coupler, ran a BBS, was part of Fidonet, wrote "doors" for BBS's. One thing you didn't mention: Phil needed a flag inside the Zip file format to signify that it was a ZIP formatted file. He used his initials. Today and forever more, if you open a ZIP file in a text editor or hex editor, you will see, right near the beginning, the letters "PK".
Yes he took that idea from msdos (and I'm sure it was done before mados). Exe files use the 'MZ' or 'ZM' bytes at the start of the file to tell dos it's an executable.
@@skilletpan5674 this is the magic number concept on files
@@redstone0234 Yes, the magic number "concept" has been around for a very long time. In the context of this video though. Windows and DOS are good enough to reference.
The 'MZ' or 'ZM' are not numbers. It's actually a reference to the author of the code: Mark Zbikowski. His initials 'MZ' or the reverse 'ZM' (although almost no one uses 'ZM' are the accepted values to indicate that it's an exefile.
Many other operating system file systems had the "magic number" as meta data in the actual file system and not an "ugly hack" like this. Cp/m,Apple DOS/Macintosh OSes,C64 etc all used meta data. I'm not sure why DOS used 3 letters as the metadata but then just decided to ignore it. That's a discussion for another day.
Holy hell...I just realized that today I finally learned what the PK meant in PKZIP.... duh!
Use a hex editor and have a look at the two first bytes of every zip file.
Me too.
Outstanding! There is so much history from the early days that we can't afford to lose. I still remember my first $700 long distance phone bill for 'a little' BBS use decades later. Compression archiving was a god-send.
Too bad that you didn't learn how to phone phreak. After I ran up my parents phone bill to over $400 back in 1987. I soon learned that if I wanted to keep up my BBS habit. I had to figure out how to get rid of that rather nasty side effect called a phone bill. I lived out on a in rural area so I didn't have the option of calling any local BBS. Everything was long distance. On a positive note, those rural telephone systems were old and very easy to hack. Once I was able to finally get rid of that unwanted "side effect" of BBSing. It really open up the world to me. I was now able to call BBS from all over the world with the phone company now picking up the tab. Because I was able to call long distance BBS's for free. I starting carrying a lot of fidonet mail bag traffic through my system.
"That so many felt a connection to a man...one of the paradoxes of being an introverted engineer who's products wind up being used by millions of people." That's very poignant Mr Autistic-Man-Who-Wrote-Task-Mnager-and-zip-folders.
When I do the three-finger salute, I'm saluting you.
I thought the three finger salute was an insult, or am I thinking of the wrong thing?
@@anon_y_mousse Three finger salute is Ctrl-Alt-Del
@@katbryce That still sounds like an insult. Maybe it's a Windows thing.
@@anon_y_mousse it is a Windows thing, it launches the very task manager that Dave wrote, so in a way, they're saying they pay their respects every time they have to use it with the wordplay of saluting (not the one finger one), like we're paying our respects to PK with zip files
@@lauram5905 Ah okay, that makes sense. My knowledge of the three finger salute usually included someone saying to read between the lines.
Minor note, I spoke with Thom Henderson a number of years ago. ARC was originally meant as a utility to package their software. It was not meant to be a stand alone product.
Interestingly I wrote a very similar program for similar reasons -- multi disk archive for lots of small files -- to use as the core of a setup for another piece of software. I think there was a lot of this going on.
@@ricomariani a group of people with a similar scratch to itch, will often develop a similar solution.
Thanks, Dave, for a compassionate discussion of the triumphant and tragic life of Phil Katz. Being an older programmer myself, I remember those days… And he brought back some things I had forgotten like the zoo format.
Phil Katz's story in school sounds like mine. I was a loner in high school (class of '81). At the time, I felt like I was the only one going through. I now know that there are lots of kids going through this. I think we as a society need to make sure that the "loners" never feel like they are isolated. Fortunately fir me, I have a string will and never had to turn to alcohol, but there are plenty of others who aren't as fortunate as me. The sad ending of Phil's life just broke my heart.💔💔💔 R.I.P. Phil. Your contribution is here to stay.
If I didn't used to edit 20-30 hours of footage a week I wouldn't even notice that you edit, let alone how smooth the edits are. I don't know if you plan ahead of time by practicing a specific pose, but aside from maybe 5 pixels and ~9 frames of dropped audio, which is trivial enough to make Hollywood jealous, I wouldn't have even noticed. Hats off to you and your perfectionism, if I wasn't an autistic perfectionist myself I would have never looked twice.
Eh? The edits are clean, but they're easy to see. Are you using a tiny phone or what?
Yeah? The edits are clear?
I think it is trying to point out as a example around 1:29? base operation system/ Cut.
New recording line up and continue at 1:30.
Yea I did not notice it until you said that there where edits in the video where his face was main stage. I had to go back and check if this was some kind of strange bot message or something going on. But no this is dam tight recording/edit work.
Placement is right but there is clear pose differences from fame to frame. But sure was clean enough to fool basically anyone not looking close at it. You got to be hunting for the splice. And considering how much I distaste frame drops I still did not notice it since it really lined up to well to even catch it. Even the lights in the background did not reveal the split obviously. But the pose I really do not think is Hollywood like..
Positioning spot on somehow? And timing spot on. :) It is honestly scary to think about the effort put on such a tiny thing that really is more work then anyone can ask from such good content as is.
And yes everyone needs to be a 'it'. Do not like it but we need to be objective in times like this. Since feeling might be hurt getting a 50/50 guess wrong.
Wow this one really hit home for me. They say only an alcoholic can understand another alcoholic. Celebrated being sober 12 years last week.
Many thanks for sharing.
Congratulations!! I known Bill for 20 years. Great guy.
Congratulations! I'm still struggling... :(
@@sophiacristina keep going you can do it
congratulations to 12 years on your recovery journey!
@@craigr306 Tyyy... :)
Dave, the social messages behind your history lessons are wonderful. I see exactly why you relate to The Friendly Giant.
Being an old timer, the use of BBS systems with acoustic couplers at 110 baud was where I started. I'd heard of Phil Katz and I remember the change from .arc to .zip formats too. It's sad to hear how Phil's demons caught up with him. It seems John McAfee also had his own demons. Thank you for telling Phil's story and sharing where those with similar problems can find help.
What a time to be alive. Still remember setting up my upload virus scanner (THD ProScan) with so much archivers... rar, arc, zip, uc2 - Hell, I even can't remember them all. I shiyed away from computers as a hobby in the late 90's but only have good memories of that time.
John McAfee was killed by the US Government, Phil Katz however was killed by himself but yes they both had their own demons and no doubt they were both high for most of the day when they were alive.
I began in 1985 with a Commodore 64 and 300 baud modem.
I came to prefer LZH.
Yeah, I was a timex sincleair 1000 starter - my first modem ever was 300 baud, manual push button connect (no coupler needed, just line passthrough) on a color computer 2. Those were the days :)
@@MandrakeDCR I miss those days too. Especially missed those days war dialing a popular BBS hoping to get the latest warez.
Lots of memories come back when you talk about "PKZip" ! I remember when I was introduced to it....many many years ago (late 80's) I couldnt believe my eyes when I move a big file 2mb, to another machine using PKZip and a floppy disk! Now, we dont think twice about using zip files on any OS.
Thank you for not just telling this tragic story, but also using it as a chance to encourage people to get help.
Given the relationship between PK and Arc, it's interesting to me that later on, PKWare was really going after people for using PKZip/PKUnzip without buying a copy, and others without paying a license for implementing the zip format. At least, that's how I remember it from the time.
Just an extra couple of technical points. First of all the newer pkzip file format was rather good. It was an end file format meaning you scanned ro the end of the file to read the file table and other important meta data etc. The compressed data was stored after the small file header. ARC and most other compression software where still stuck in Unix tape backup land and didn't do that. This made zips fast when it came to manipulating them like adding new files or deleting files from the archive.
The second point was that further improvements to compression where added and it wasn't for a few years till other compressors started to do better or where close. Most of the time it was just the pure speed of compressing and decompressing though that made pkzip the standard. ARJ,UC2,RAR and a couple of others all had their better features than pkzip but most of the time pkzip was good enough and just faster than them.
Alcohol can be dangerous stuff, especially for loner introverts. Thanks for shedding light on this.
It's a weird world where some of the most freely available means to self-medicate are also the most dangerous (nevermind we are a heavily medicated society now).
Also point people to the Sinclair method as most rehab amounts to voodoo.
I grew up in the BBS, modem, arc, zip days, so this was pure nostalgia gold! But very sad ending to it all. Thank you Dave. Love your channel :)