His 8th-grade performance in the Michigan Mathematics Prize Competition led to an invitation in an NSF-funded summer program at Oakland University where he became friends with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Jeff Sachs.
In March 1982, he replaced Tim Paterson as development lead and manager for Microsoft's MS-DOS 2.0, a position he held through DOS 4.0.
His first major contributions were the addition of hierarchical directory structure to DOS 2.0 and installable device drivers which later led to Plug and Play in Windows.
From March 1985 until 1991, he was on the architecture team for OS/2, development manager for file systems and device drivers, and technical advisor to Paul Maritz.
Zbikowski returned to work at Ivy Softworks and Atlas Informatics (2014-2017) [4] as CTO and then at Valve Corporation (2017-2019), retiring again in December 2019.