Chapter 1037 (1/2)

Soon, the marketing director of Xinlang contacted Philip Katz, the founder of winzip, through Lisa online.

I don't know. I didn't know until I contacted him. It turned out that Philip Katz was actually a hacker.

A famous hacker in the United States. However, what they do is different from traditional hackers.

Traditional hackers show off their technology by conquering the U.S. defense system.

The hacker is not.

He was originally a programmer, but also a self-taught hacker. His usual hobby is to dig all kinds of loopholes, but he doesn't make a profit. A purely personal interest.

It's just like that ordinary people like to play the glory of the king, read novels such as the life of reborn demons, or travel after work.

This is purely a personal hobby. Philip Katz's hobby is to dig holes.

And he found one of the most angry things. That is data compression technology, all in the hands of large companies, such as IBM.

You know, today's hard disk space is very small, which forces users to spend a high price to buy a hard disk with a larger space.

Often, those large companies have very mature data compression technology, which can achieve ultra-high compression ratio.

Philip Katz was angry about this.

In particular, in the DOS era, that is, in 1988, the Internet had just begun to take shape, and the most popular was an electronic bulletin board (BBS) system for exchanging information, which used telephone line dialing to log in to the service platform built by others at home.

This system is somewhat similar to the current forum and newsgroup. Due to the mutual transfer of messages between webmasters, it has also become a huge information network (Huiduo network).

In the Internet era when Qin Feng did not introduce cable modem technology into China, there were dozens of such BBS in China. Qiu Bojun, the author of the famous word processing software WPS, and Zhu chongjun, the author of CCed, were very famous personal webmasters. This method can not only transfer text information, but also upload files to the computer of the site for other users to download. Due to the poor access speed of the telephone line, transmitting large files through BBS is really a painful thing.

Therefore, using file compression technology to reduce the volume of files and compress multiple files into one packet has become a skill that BBS users must master. At that time, a popular compression technology on American BBS was called arc. Because it was a compression technology developed by a commercial company, you need to pay for using this software.

Many people don't have that much money. Therefore, you can only choose to transmit slowly.

At that time, Philip Katz was a young man addicted to BBS. Because he often wandered on BBS, he was very dissatisfied with the charge of arc. He developed a program called pkarc, which is fully compatible with arc and can compress and decompress arc files. As a result, a large number of arc users naturally turn to Philip Katz's free software.

Arc's production company angrily took Philip Katz to court, and the court naturally ruled that Philip Katz prohibited the continued development and dissemination of pkarc. This judgment did not destroy Philip Katz's fighting spirit, but aroused his determination to fight arc to the end. In the virtual world, freedom and equality are always the permanent pursuit of real programmers. He gave up the development of pkarc and vowed to write a better compression software than arc to defeat arc. This lawsuit not only created the birth of a programming genius, but also created a file standard later in the Internet era. A few weeks later, the ZIP format that later ruled the whole BBS world and even the Internet world made the first loud cry in Philip Katz's hands!

This is the birth of ZIP format later. Naturally, with the birth of ZIP format, arc company soon disappeared. After all, there is only one charging software, so a company with such a single charging mode can not operate for a long time.

However, Philip Katz was also retaliated. He was fired from his software company. As for the reason, it is unknown. However, some people in the industry speculate that arc may have done it.

After all, Philip Katz is the first person in the world to rely on a software to defeat a company.