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 le...
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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 lecturer 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 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...
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