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Comment by Hitchhiker | Hacker News Reader

A prize up-vote goes to the first comment on this link to tell what MZ stands for without Google ( please be honest ;-)).

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I had looked that up before, it stands for the initials of a guy at Microsoft working on the DOS format. :)

Greg takes the win !

Happens to be this gentleman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zbikowski. Though I never worked with 'Zibbo' directly, I heard several legends of him - a lot of him centering around how he is one of the nicest people around. Which is unusual given the time at Microsoft he did a lot of his best work in.

This post is awesome , more for the folks commenting. Many times, there seems to a direct proportionality between skills and humility / niceness. Am certain Mark deserves his name to be on the executable walk of fame ( may I add, he stands more or less alone ;-)).

Channel 9 did a great interview with him a few years ago. It was a good chance for us non-Microsofties to see the man behind the MZ.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Behind+The+Code/Mark-Zbikowsk...

I have seriously written a parser/loader for this file format without it ever occurring to me that there might be something interesting lurking behind those two letters; I feel stupid. (edit: and thank you for making me realize this.)

As a treat for being honest, here's a jump-off point that will truly be rewarding if you go all out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zmist

Woah; I've actually looked at Z0mbie's disassemblers before, but I had never realized I should look at Mistfall: I'll be certain to check it out, as it sounds amazingly interesting. (edit: somehow I keep forgetting the) THANKS! ;P

(I develop Cydia (Mobile)Substrate, a library, used by all the people who do random iPhone hacks, for performing runtime code modification in a reasonably safe/sane manner.)

Z0mbie made a bunch of us AV folks go crazy in the mind. Some resent even the name being mentioned around them ;-).

I found out from reading the source to Wordpad, that on Windows 95/98, Wordpad would reject ANY file starting 'MZ' as 'executable'. Quite amusing.

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