Marc McDonald
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Marc B. McDonald was Microsoft's first employee (not counting Monte Davidoff, who was with the company before it incorporated). He is credited with designing the FAT File System for the MS-DOS operating system. He left the company in January 1984, citing a reason that Microsoft had gotten "too big" (Microsoft was at around four hundred employees at that time). Marc rejoined when Microsoft bought Design Intelligence in the late 1990s.
When McDonald rejoined Microsoft, a number of employees including Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were involved in trying to get him assigned the employee number "1". However due to a limitation in the human resources software, that proved to be too difficult. Instead he carries a badge with all the digits scraped off except "1". [link]
Marc currently works in the QA-oriented Windows Defect Prevention group. Much of his recent work focuses on organizational best practices to drive software quality from the bottom up. He is co-author of "The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention" [link] to be published in late 2006. He holds five software patents.
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