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http://www.packerplus.com/news/state/may00/katz21052000a.asp The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz By Lee Hawkins Jr. of the Journal Sentinel staff Last Updated: May 20, 2000 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. 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. He was alone, estranged long ago from his family and a virtual stranger to employees of his own company, PKWare Inc. of Brown Deer. He was 37. 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. Katz's inventions shrink computer files 50% to 70% to conserve precious space on hard disks. His compression software helped set a standard so widespread that "zipping" - compressing a file - became a part of the lexicon of PC users worldwide. But the riches his genius produced were no balm for what had become a hellish life of paranoia, booze and strip clubs. 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. Katz owned a condominium in Mequon but rarely stayed there. Desperate to avoid warrants for his arrest, he bounced between cheap hotels near the airport. He got his mail at a Mailboxes Etc. store in Franklin. "This guy did not have one friend in the world. 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. "Just imagine having nobody in your life. Not anybody to call. Nobody." High School Outcast Phil Katz was a quiet, asthmatic child whose athletic pursuits as a kid went no further than riding dirt bikes in his Glendale neighborhood. A 1980 graduate of Nicolet High School, Katz was a "geek" long before that term was linked with dot-com companies and piles of money. "He was an outcast, definitely someone who was picked on," says Rick Mayer, who graduated with Katz. "He spoke in a somewhat nasal tone. He was short, and, well I don't want to say homely, so I'll say he was plain looking." After 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. "I enjoyed working with you in mathematics and physics classes through the four terrible, long, unbearable, tortuous, but wonderful years at Nicolet," Katz wrote. "I hope your future is bright and your life is happy (if possible). May a calculator bring great happiness to you." "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. "I now know that that was a call for help. That was not a joke." A loner by nature, Katz gravitated to analytical pursuits. Katz and his father, Walter, spent weekend afternoons playing chess and evenings writing code for programmable calculators in the days before PCs forever changed computing. Since programmable calculators had very little memory, Phil and Walter had to work very efficiently. "The earliest program I remember him writing was a game program that dealt with landing on the moon," says Brian Kiehnau, Katz's former brother-in-law who met him in 1977. "It was very crude and simple, but it was complex for what he had in terms of hardware. He got real good at optimizing programs, and he learned to get the job done with the least amount of instructions and running times." In 1980, Katz entered the computer science program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Around the same time, Walter and Hildegard Katz bought Phil his first computer, an original IBM PC. It had two floppy drives, a monochrome monitor and 64K of memory, an astoundingly small amount com
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