Then sometime around 1987 or so Phil Katz came out with PKARC, which was basically my ARC program with the compression/decompression routines rewritten in assembler, which made it run a lot faster. I have to hand it to him, he had a real talent for assembly coding. We approached him about licensing, but he rejected the idea. One thing led to another, and eventually we sued him. Fortunately his program was such a blatant copy of mine that we were able to win the lawsuit before we ran out of money. In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988. Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. We sort of lost touch after that. We would have liked to have kept in touch, but we couldn't afford the legal bills. There wasn't a lot to sue for anyway. None of us was getting rich. 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. ... Ouch. No love lost there. Bitter, are we? | 
