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HP Forum Archive 18

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Quote "May a Calculator bring you great Happiness"
Message #1 Posted by Jeffrey Davis on 14 Feb 2008, 8:08 p.m.

Phil Katz quote from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal covering his death several years ago. He and his father wrote code for programmable calculators, compression routines.
Does anyone know of any documents associated with this or if these routines are available to review for the calculators? Please find the link for the article below.http://www2.jsonline.com/news/state/may00/katz21052000a.asp

      
Re: Quote "May a Calculator bring you great Happiness"
Message #2 Posted by Guy FRANCOIS (Brussels) on 15 Feb 2008, 4:27 a.m.,
in response to message #1 by Jeffrey Davis

May he rest in peace. The man really lived a sad life as a victim of alcohol abuse, which he died from in the end. I have been a user of pkzip (now securezip) since the DOS-days.

Kind regards.

Guy

            
Re: Quote "May a Calculator bring you great Happiness"
Message #3 Posted by Namir on 16 Feb 2008, 1:45 p.m.,
in response to message #2 by Guy FRANCOIS (Brussels)

I read the article about Phil Katz and I felt very sorry that a genius like him turns self-destructive.

Namir

      
Re: Quote "May a Calculator bring you great Happiness"
Message #4 Posted by Jeff Davis on 17 Feb 2008, 1:29 p.m.,
in response to message #1 by Jeffrey Davis

Does anyone have any information about what kind of Calculators they used? It would be interesting to see what kind of compression routines they used. It is sad to see this happen to someone like this.

      
Re: Quote "May a Calculator bring you great Happiness"
Message #5 Posted by Les Bell on 17 Feb 2008, 9:48 p.m.,
in response to message #1 by Jeffrey Davis

I don't know about the compression routines, but the encryption algorithm used in PKZIP is described in "Applied Cryptography", by Bruce Schneier, on pp. 394-395. It's not very sophisticated, and can be attacked quite easily.

Best,

--- Les
[http://www.lesbell.com.au]

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