Mark Zbikowski
| Mark Zbikowski | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 21, 1956 Detroit, Michigan |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
Harvard University Yale University University of Washington |
| Known for | His work at Microsoft |
Mark "Zibo" Joseph Zbikowski (born March 21, 1956) 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 third employee to reach this milestone, after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He is currently a technical adviser to several companies and a PhD student at the University of Washington.
He was the designer of the DOS executable file format, used in MS-DOS executable files, and the headers of that file format start with his initials: the magic number of this type of file is the ASCII characters 'MZ' (0x4D, 0x5A).
Zbikowski was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1956. While attending The Roeper School (then known as Roeper City And Country School) from 1961 to 1974, he developed an interest in mathematics and computers. His 8th-grade performance in the Michigan Mathematics Prize Competition led to an invitation in an NSF-funded summer program at Oakland University where he became friends with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Jeff Sachs.
Zbikowski pursued Computer Science at Harvard (A.B. 1978) and at Yale (S.M. 1979). He was active in both universities' Gilbert and Sullivan performing groups.
Ballmer recruited Zbikowski, who 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 contributions were the addition of hierarchical directory structure to DOS 2.0 and installable device drivers. 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 is attributed to him.
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