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Comment by smarks | Hacker News Reader

Very sad story. The guy's initials are immortalized in the magic number of the zip file format, the bytes of which are

    0x50 0x4b 0x03 0x04

The values 0x50 0x4b are 'P' 'K' in ASCII.

Note also that every Java JAR file is also a ZIP file, so they all begin with the same magic number.

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Windows executables start with "MZ", for Mark Zbikowski.

Edit: fixed the name

I tried googling this but nothing came up until I stumbled across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable which says it stands for Mark Zbikowski (which is supported by a quick Google of that name).

You're right, I mis-remembered it. Thanks for the correction!

FreeBSD (and other BSD) UFS2 file systems have a magic number that coincides with Kirk McKusick's birthday.

#define FS_UFS2_MAGIC 0x19540119

The birthdays of Linus Torvalds and some of his relatives are encoded, in hexadecimal, in the magic constants passed to the Linux reboot() system call.

More recently I found out that systemd binary format starts with LPKS and a few other initials. Those who know the dev team can easily find which is who.

As a kid poking around with the built-in DOSSHELL hex viewer, I thought it was slang for MS/Microsoft

He's also been immortalized in artwork:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/silentarmy/351314710

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