
Although PKWARE became a multimillion-dollar company, Katz was more noted for his technical expertise than business prowess. PKZIP made Katz one of the most well-known shareware authors of all time. Steve Burg, a former Graysoft programmer, joined PKWARE in 1988. (Phil Katz Software) in 1986, with the company's operations located in his home in Glendale, Wisconsin, but he remained at Graysoft until 1987.
#Pkzip pkware software#
Strong positive feedback and encouragement prompted Katz to release his compression program, PKARC, and eventually to make his software shareware. Its much greater speed caused it to spread very quickly throughout the BBS community. He first publicly released only PKXARC, an extraction program, as freeware. Katz had a special flair for optimizing code: besides writing critical code in assembly language, he would write C code to perform the same task in several different ways and then examine the compiler output to see which produced the most efficient assembly code. PKARC, written partially in assembly language, was much faster. ARC was written in C, with the source code available on System Enhancement Associates' bulletin board system (BBS). At the time, he had worked on an alternative to Thom Henderson's ARC, named PKARC. Katz left Allen-Bradley in 1986 to work for Graysoft, a Milwaukee-based software company.

He wrote code to run programmable logic controllers, which operated manufacturing equipment on shop floors worldwide for Allen-Bradley's customers. After his graduation, he was hired by the Allen-Bradley company as a programmer.

Katz graduated from the Computer Science Engineering program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Phil Katz was a graduate of Nicolet High School in Glendale, Wisconsin.
