Mark "Zibo" Joseph Zbikowski (born March 21, 1956) is a former

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 ...

Architect and an early computer

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

. He started working at the company only a few years after its inception, leading efforts in

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 ...

OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 r ...

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the Capital city, capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, List of ...

and

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system. The first version of Win ...

. In 2006, he was honored for 25 years of service with the company, the third employee to reach this milestone, after

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. He retired the same year from Microsoft. He was the designer of the MS-DOS executable file format, and the headers of that file format start with his initials: the

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

characters 'MZ' (0x4D, 0x5A).

Early years

Zbikowski was born in

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at t ...

Michigan Michigan () is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the List of U.S. states and ...

, 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. He later finished second in the MMPC twice in 1972-73 and 1973-74. 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.

Career

Microsoft

Ballmer recruited Zbikowski, who joined Microsoft in 1981. In March 1982, he replaced

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 ...

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 which later led to

Plug and Play In computing, a plug and play (PnP) device or computer bus is one with a specification that facilitates the recognition of a hardware component in a system without the need for physical device configuration or user intervention in resolving resou ...

in Windows. From March 1985 until 1991, he was on the architecture team for

, development manager for file systems and device drivers, and technical advisor to Paul Maritz. The breakthrough concept of

Installable File System The Installable File System (IFS) is a filesystem API in MS-DOS/PC DOS 4.x, IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows that enables the operating system to recognize and load drivers for file systems. History When IBM and Microsoft were co-developing OS ...

in OS/2 is attributed to him.

Microsoft & IBM

Following the demise of the Microsoft/ IBM joint development agreement, he was an architect, development manager and key contributor to

, working for Jim Allchin and, later, Anthony Short. This led to Cairo's Object File System 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 The architecture of Windows NT, a line of operating systems produced and sold by Microsoft, is a layered design that consists of two main components, user mode and kernel mode. It is a preemptive, reentrant multitasking operating system, whic ...

, focusing on performance and size, before becoming architect and development manager for NT file systems in 1998.

Others

In 2001, Zbikowski was a candidate for director of the Harvard Alumni Association. Zbikowski retired from Microsoft in June 2006. Due to his interest in education, he became affiliated, in 2007, with the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattl ...

as a lecturer in the Computer Science and Engineering department in the College of Engineering. Zbikowski returned to work at Ivy Softworks and Atlas Informatics (2014-2017) as CTO and then at

Valve Corporation Valve Corporation is an American video game developer, publisher, and digital distribution company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. It is the developer of the software distribution platform Steam and the franchises ''Half-Life'', '' C ...

(2017-2019), retiring again in December 2019. He presently is Technology Advisor to Polyverse. Mark Zbikowski is or has been affiliated with the following companies: * (June 2013)

Jelastic Jelastic is a cloud platform software vendor that provides multi-cloud Platform as a Service-based on container technology for hosting service providers, ISVs, telecommunication companies, enterprises and developers. The platform is available as ...

as Senior Technical Advisor. * (August 2010) SimulConsult as CTO. * (January 2008) Parallels, Inc. as Senior Technical Advisor. * (December 2007) Skytap as Technical Advisor. * (2007) InstallFree as Technical Advisor. * (October 2006) BlueDot / Faves as Technical Advisor and Investor.Blue Dot Launches Partner Program, Adds DOS’s MZ to Advisory Board
/ref>

References

External links

Mark Zbikowski – From DOS 1.0 to Windows Vista
__NOTOC__ {{DEFAULTSORT:Zbikowski, Mark 1956 births Living people Microsoft employees DOS people OS/2 people Microsoft Windows people Harvard University alumni Yale University alumni