Marc McDonald

Marc B. McDonald is an American who was Microsoft's first salaried employee (not counting Monte Davidoff, who wrote the math package for Basic for a flat fee). He is credited with designing the FAT File System for Standalone Basic which was the file system for the MS-DOS operating system and Microsoft Windows. 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). He was Asymetrix's first employee where he worked on a Lisp pcode system used internally and redesigned the ToolBook 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. Marc rejoined when Microsoft bought Design Intelligence in the late 2000.

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". 

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" published in November 2007. He holds six software patents.