Charles Petzold

Charles Petzold (born February 2, 1953) is an American programmer and technical author on Windows applications. He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and was named one of Microsoft's seven Windows Pioneers.

Biography Petzold graduated with a Master of Science in Mathematics from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1975. Aside from writing books about Windows programming, he has contributed to various magazines about computers.

He had an interest in electronic music and in 1977 started building electronic music instruments out of CMOS chips. In 1979, Petzold started building a computer-controlled digital electronic music synthesizer based on the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. The debt encouraged him to use the computer to earn some revenue, so he wrote an article about ANSI.SYS and the PROMPT command. He submitted it to PC Magazine for which they paid $800. This was the beginning of Petzold's career as a paid writer.

In 1984, PC Magazine decided to do a review of printers. They asked all current New York contributors to help with the review. Petzold showed the staff some small assembly-language programs he had written. Soon he was busy writing 300-500 byte .COM file utilities for PC Magazine.

Petzold was soon getting so much freelance work from PC Magazine that he was able to quit his job.

Microsoft then decided that Microsoft Systems Journal would cover both MS-DOS and Windows programming. Jonathan Lazarus, who contracted with Microsoft, recruited Petzold to write some articles.

Magazines PC Magazine Contributing Editor (1985 to 2005) PC Tutor column (1985 to 1987) Environments column (1987 to 1995) Microsoft Systems Journal Contributing Editor (1987 to 2000) Windows Sources Contributing Editor and Columnist (1993) MSDN Magazine Contributing Editor (2000 to 2014)

Online articles Maxwell, Molecules, and Evolution How Far from True North are the Avenues of Manhattan? Articles for MSDN magazine