Education
He is currently a technical adviser to several companies and a Doctor of Philosophy student at the University of Washington.
He is currently a technical adviser to several companies and a Doctor of Philosophy student at the University of Washington.
He started working at the company only a few years after its inception, leading efforts in Mississippi-DOS, Operating system/2, Cairo and Windows Northwest Territories. 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 was the designer of the DOS executable file format, used in Mississippi-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.
Zbikowski pursued Computer Science at Harvard (Bachelor of Arts 1978) and at Yale (Master of Science 1979). He was active in both universities" Gilbert and Sullivan performing groups.
Ballmer recruited Zbikowski, who joined in 1981. In March 1982 he replaced Tim Paterson as development lead and manager for "s Mississippi-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 Operating system/2, development manager for file systems and device drivers, and technical advisor to Paul Maritz. The breakthrough concept of Installable File System in Operating system/2 is attributed to him. Following the demise of the /International Business Machines Corporation joint development agreement, he was an architect, development manager and key contributor to Cairo, 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 Northwest Territories kernel, focusing on performance and size, before becoming architect and development manager for Northwest Territories file systems in 1998. In 2001, Zbikowski was a candidate for director of the Harvard Alumni Association.
Zbikowski retired from in June 2006. Mark Zbikowski is affiliated with the following companies:
(June 2013) Jelastic as Senior Technical Advisor.
(January 2008) Parallels, Incorporated. as Senior Technical Advisor.
(December 2007) Skytap as Technical Advisor. (2007) InstallFree as Technical Advisor. (October 2006) BlueDot / Faves as Technical Advisor and Investor.