After approximately 20 years, I finally found the meaning of ‘MZ’: the string that appears in the beginning of every DOS/Windows/.NET executable.
It stands for “Mark Zbikowski“, the architect in Microsoft who designed the executable format.
This resonates nicely with some previous discussions on the definition of success. Think of the irony: the guy’s initials are replicated millions, if not billions of times all over the world, and are known to every decent hacker on Earth. Yet, to most of those hackers the name “Mark Zbikowski” would hardly ring any bells. “MZ” are just magic letters that come in the beginning of the executable, that’s all.