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Marc B. McDonald is an American computer programmer who wasMicrosoft's first salaried employee (not countingMonte Davidoff, who wrote the math package for BASIC for a flat fee).
He is credited with designing and implementing the8-bit File Allocation Table file system for theNCR 8200[citation needed] data-entry terminal and Microsoft'sStandalone Disk BASIC-80 in 1977.
McDonald also developed an 8-bit operating system called M-DOS or MIDAS; the system itself was never released by Microsoft, but its file system (a variant of FAT) influencedTim Paterson'sQDOS.[1][2]
A version of "Standalone Disk Basic" was ported to a Seattle Computer Products 8086 byBob O'Rear, andTim Paterson was often at Microsoft to aid in the effort. Tim Paterson copied the key aspects of the FAT system (single table, each directory entry containing the head of the file's cluster list, and the last value indicating the number of sectors used in the last cluster) when he implemented theFAT12 file system for his operating system86-DOS in 1980, which became the basis forMS-DOS andPC DOS in 1981. He made two mistakes in implementation:
McDonald left Microsoft in January 1984, citing a reason that the company had gotten "too big", Microsoft having around four hundred employees at that time. He wasAsymetrix's first employee where he worked on aLISP pcode system used internally and redesigned theToolBook runtime and compiler for ToolBook 3.0. At Design Intelligence, Marc worked on adaptive document design and an expression-based programming language used for layout experiments. He rejoined Microsoft in December 2000 when it bought Design Intelligence.
When McDonald rejoined Microsoft, a number of employees includingBill Gates andSteve Ballmer tried to assign him the employee number "1" but found that the human resources software did not allow this. Instead he was given a badge with all the digits scraped off except "1".[3]
McDonald worked in theQA-orientedWindows Defect Prevention group, focusing on organizational best practices to drive software quality from the bottom up. He is co-author ofThe Practical Guide to Defect Prevention published in November 2007.[4] He holds sixsoftware patents.
McDonald left Microsoft in September 2011. He was with startup MindMode Corp. through 2012, and has been at PaperG since.[5]
During this same period, Marc McDonald also worked on developing an 8-bit operating system called M-DOS (usually pronounced "Midas" or "My DOS"). […] M-DOS provided good performance and, with a more flexible FAT than that built into BASIC, had a better file-handling structure than the up-and-coming CP/M operating system.(xix+1570 pages; 26 cm) (NB. This edition was published in 1988 after extensive rework of the withdrawn 1986 first edition by a different team of authors.[1])
Remembering his conversation at NCC with Marc McDonald about File Allocation Tables in his unfinished, large, and never-released 8-bit MIDAS operating system, Paterson decided that the FAT scheme was a better way to handle disk information than the way CP/M did it.
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