Mark Zbikowski

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Mark Zbikowski (born March 21, 1956 in Detroit, Michigan) is a former Microsoft Architect and an early computer hacker. 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^{[citation needed]}. He is currently a technical adviser and investor to Blue Dot and a lecturer at the University of Washington.

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.^[1] The magic number of this type of file is the ASCII string 'MZ' (0x4D, 0x5A).

[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.

Zbikowski retired from Microsoft in June of 2006. In later years when asked why he was still working, Mark often said, “to set a good example for my children”. Mark's youngest child, Jeffrey "JZ" Zbikowski, graduated high school on June 5 and Mark retired shortly thereafter.

In January of 2008 Mark Zbikowski joined SWsoft as Senior Technical Advisor.^[2]