Did you know that last week was the 10th anniversary of the death of Phil Katz? For those who don't know, Phil invented the ZIP file format, including the popular PKZIP and PKUNZIP toolset. Perhaps his greatest contribution is that Phil released the ZIP file format as an open standard, which meant anyone could write their own tools to put data in ZIP files. FreeDOS uses InfoZip to manage ZIP files, for example.
Phil battled alcoholism for much of his life, and on April 14 2000, Phil was found dead in his hotel room due to complications related to alcoholism. A pity it all turned out badly for Phil. We'll miss him.
La Stampa posted an article (in Italian, see Google's translation) describing a bit of Phil's life. You can also read more at Wikipedia.
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About Me
- Jim Hall
- I'm Jim Hall, the founder and Project Coordinator for the FreeDOS Project. I started FreeDOS in 1994, when I was an undergraduate physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Other developers got in touch with me, and we began work creating our own version of DOS that would be compatible with MS-DOS. I shared the extended DOS utilities that I had written for myself, as did others. We also found public domain or open source programs that replaced other DOS commands. A few months later, we released our first FreeDOS “Alpha” distribution. And from there, FreeDOS grew into what you see today!
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