PKARC, in addition to duplicating the compression techniques used in ARC, added an additional algorithm which produced smaller files. However, these files still used the file extension “.ARC”. This led to the situation where files which appeared to be created by SEA’s ARC could not be read by that program. System Enhancement Associates’s Henderson considered this an appropriation of his product’s trademarked name, and sued Katz. Katz withdrew PKARC from the market and instead released PKPAK, which was similar in all but name and the file extension used.

System Enhancement Associates soon discovered that Katz had copied significant amounts of the copyrighted source code distributed with ARC. They sued for trademark violation and copyright infringement. SEA and Katz settled under a confidential cross-licence agreement.[3] According to expert witnesses hired by SEA, Katz had copied ARC’s source code so extensively that even identical comments and spelling errors were found. The BBS community, arguably due to prompting from Katz, took the suit as an example of a large, faceless corporation crushing the little-guy — even though both companies were family businesses with fewer than 5 or so people. SEA’s founder, Thom Henderson, has said that users who spoke to him at the time “didn’t care” if PKARC misappropriated his copyrights and trademark; they just wanted to use the fastest software to compress and uncompress files.[4]

[edit] PKZIP

Katz quickly replaced PKARC with PKPAK, and soon after that, with the new and completely re-written PKZIP. Released as shareware, PKZIP compressed both better and faster than ARC. Katz kept the new ZIP file format open. As a result, it soon became a standard for file compression across many platforms.

PKZIP made Katz one of the most well known shareware authors of all time. Although his company PKWARE became a multimillion dollar company, Katz was more noted for his technical expertise than expertise in running a company. His family assisted him in running the company, but he eventually fired them when they denied him access to the company’s profits.[5]

Katz was adamantly opposed to Microsoft Windows in the early 90s. This led to PKWARE missing out on the opportunity to be the first to bring PKZIP to the platform.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz

I assume Python creator Guido van Rossum is still at Google.

There’s Joe Becker, the father of Unicode – don’t know what he’s doing now.

– Ken

Ken Thompson, creator of C and Unix (w/ Dennis Ritchie) is at Google now. Don’t know where Dennis is.

Andy Hertzfeld, a key Mac engineer (Hypercard too), is at Google too….

http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=c9&t=2d

Dennis Ritchie (creator of Unix and C) retired from Bell Labs in 2007 and I don’t know what he is up to.