Mark Zbikowski
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mark Zbikowski (born March 21, 1956 in Detroit, Michigan) is a Microsoft Architect. He started working at the company only a few years after its inception, leading efforts in MS-DOS, OS/2, Cairo and Windows NT. In 2006 he was honored for 25 years of service with the company, the first employee to reach this milestone other than Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He is currently a technical advisor and investor to Blue Dot Inc.
He was the designer of the DOS executable file format, used in MS-DOS executable files, and his initials grace the headers of that file format. The magic number of this type of file is the ASCII string 'MZ' (0x4D5A).
[edit] Early years
Zbikowski, or "Zibo" as he was called, attended high school at the private and progressive Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, along with his younger sister Susan. A small class D school located near the better-known Cranbrook Academy of Art, Roeper was known for its high percentage of graduates receiving Ivy League placement. Zbikowski was no exception.
While at Roeper, Zbikowski was active on the football and basketball teams - the Roeper Roughriders, played leading characters in the school's drama productions, taught Science Fiction literature classes to 7th - 9th graders, sang in the glee club, and placed in the top 10 in the state in the Michigan Mathematics competition three times (finishing second twice and beating his friend Steve Ballmer).
Zbikowski was most famous, or infamous as the case may be, for his computer programming prowess, starting in 7th grade. In his senior year at Roeper, c. 1973/4, Zbikowski became known as one of the earliest computer crackers, after cracking the security system on Wayne State University's MTS (Michigan Terminal Service, developed at University of Michigan) mainframe for his own amusement. According to Zbikowski, when he offered to show the university how to fix the security leak, university officials threatened prosecution and offered him a job during the same meeting.
Upon graduation from Roeper, he left for Harvard University (after being recruited by childhood friend Steve Ballmer), where he earned his bachelor's degree in applied mathematics. In 1978 he began studying Artificial Intelligence at Yale University, graduating in 1980. At both institutions he spent significant time in theatrical productions, both in set construction and design and chorus roles.
After graduating from Yale, Zbikowski moved to Boston, Massachusetts and worked for Digital Equipment Corporation in a performance analysis role.
[edit] Microsoft
Zbikowski joined Microsoft in 1981. In March 1982 he replaced Tim Paterson as development lead and manager for Microsoft's MS-DOS 2.0, a position he held through DOS 4.0. His first major contribution was the addition of hierarchical directory structure to DOS 2.0.
From March 1985 until 1991, he was on the architecture team for OS/2, development manager for file systems and device drivers, and technical advisor to Paul Maritz. The breakthrough concept of Installable File System in OS/2 was attributed to him.
Following the demise of the Microsoft/IBM joint development agreement, he was an architect, development manager and key contributor to Cairo, leading the file system (Object File System specifically) and content index efforts.
In 1996, as Cairo migrated from being a standalone product to a technology source, Zbikowski worked under Lou Perazzoli on the Windows NT kernel, focusing on performance and size, before becoming architect and development manager for NT file systems in 1998.
In 2001, Zbikowski was a candidate for director of the Harvard Alumni Association.
