Marc B. McDonald is an American who was

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

's first salaried employee (not counting

Monte Davidoff Monte Davidoff (; born 1956) is an American computer programmer. Davidoff is from Glendale, Wisconsin. He graduated from Nicolet High School in 1974, and went on to Harvard College, where he majored in applied mathematics, the department at Harva ...

, who wrote the math package for BASIC for a flat fee). He is credited with designing and implementing the 8-bit File Allocation Table file system for the

NCR 8200 NCR Corporation, previously known as National Cash Register, is an American software, consulting and technology company providing several professional services and electronic products. It manufactures self-service kiosks, point-of-sale termin ...

data-entry terminal and Microsoft's Standalone Disk BASIC-80 in 1977. McDonald also developed an 8-bit operating system called M-DOS or

MIDAS Midas (; grc-gre, Μίδας) was the name of a king in Phrygia with whom several myths became associated, as well as two later members of the Phrygian royal house. The most famous King Midas is popularly remembered in Greek mythology for his ...

; the system itself was never released by Microsoft, but its file system (a variant of FAT) influenced

Tim Paterson Tim Paterson (born 1 June 1956) is an American computer programmer, best known for creating 86-DOS, an operating system for the Intel 8086. This system emulated the application programming interface (API) of CP/M, which was created by Gary ...

's QDOS. A version of "Standalone Disk Basic" was ported to a Seattle Computer Products 8086 by Bob O'Rear, and

was often at Microsoft to aid in the effort. Tim Paterson copied the key aspects of the FAT system (single table, each directory entry containing the head of the file's cluster list, and the last value indicating the number of sectors used in the last cluster) when he implemented the

FAT12 File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by ...

file system for his operating system 86-DOS in 1980, which became the basis for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

and

PC DOS PC or pc may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Player character or playable character, a fictional character controlled by a human player, usually in role-playing games or computer games * '' Port Charles'', an American daytime TV soap opera * ...

in 1981. He made two mistakes in implementation: * In early versions there was no directory stopper entry. This resulted in reading the entire directory track to discover a file did not exist. On floppies this was a major slowdown. * MS-DOS updates the directory entry and FAT tables in the wrong order when a file is created. By writing the directory first, if the system crashed before the FAT was updated, a dangling reference would be created. This results in a cross-linked file on the next cluster allocation. McDonald left Microsoft in January 1984, citing a reason that the company had gotten "too big", Microsoft having around four hundred employees at that time. He was

Asymetrix SumTotal Systems, Inc. is a software company based in Gainesville, Florida that provides human resource management software and services to private and public sector organizations. The company uses multiple cloud-based channels, including softw ...

's first employee where he worked on a LISP pcode system used internally and redesigned the

ToolBook ToolBook was a Microsoft Windows based e-learning content authoring application, initially released in 1990 by Asymetrix Corporation, now SumTotal Systems. ToolBook uses a book metaphor — a project file is thought of as a ''book'' containing ' ...

runtime and compiler for ToolBook 3.0. At Design Intelligence, Marc worked on adaptive document design and an expression-based programming language used for layout experiments. He rejoined Microsoft in December 2000 when it bought Design Intelligence. When McDonald rejoined Microsoft, a number of employees including

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

and Steve Ballmer tried to assign him the employee number "1" but found that the human resources software did not allow this. Instead he was given a badge with all the digits scraped off except "1". McDonald worked in the QA-oriented

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

Defect Prevention group, focusing on organizational best practices to drive software quality from the bottom up. He is co-author of ''The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention'' published in November 2007. He holds six

software patent A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, libraries, user interface, or algorithm. Background A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a state to a patent holder for a limited period of time, u ...

s. McDonald left Microsoft in September 2011. He was with startup MindMode Corp. through 2012, and has been at PaperG since.

References

(xix+1570 pages; 26 cm) (NB. This edition was published in 1988 after extensive rework of the withdrawn 1986 first edition by a different team of authors

{{DEFAULTSORT:McDonald, Marc Microsoft employees Year of birth missing (living people) Living people

See also

References