Katz talked freer, laughed harder, stayed up longer and dreamed bigger when he had a drink in his hand, friends say. Drinking brought a painfully shy man out of his shell.
I wonder if alcohol served him as an unfortunate remedy for his introverted person.
And on unrelated note:
He got real good at optimizing programs, and he learned to get the job done with the least amount of instructions and running times.
I like the culture of code bumping back in the day. Although, we now live in a time of abundant CPU cycles and memory, there's still value in that, even above many layers of abstraction. Sadly, increasing number of programmers do not care or even aware of their programs' resource footprint on the hardware.