The Ext2 Installable File System software has been designed and implemented by Stephan Schreiber.
Stephan was born in 1974 in Berlin, Germany and is still living in this exciting city. He started computer programming in his youth: assembler on a Commodore 64 (in 1988). Later he bought a PC and became interested in Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. He began his university studies in 1997 and graduated as Engineer of Computer Science in late 2002.
This project came about because of a mistake of a book store. Initially Stephan had ordered a book about device driver development on Windows NT, but instead he received the brilliant book "Windows NT File System Internals" by Rajeev Nagar, O'Reily & Associates. (Unfortunately, this great book is currently out of print.) Stephan decided to keep it because it turned out to be much more interesting than the book he had originally ordered.
When Linux was released, the idea was born - getting Windows NT to access the Linux file system. This became Stephan's diploma thesis project. Thus, the kernel mode driver Ext2fs.sys (version 1.00) was finished in late 2002. This early version 1.00 of the driver already had all the features of the version 1.10, but was intended for running on Windows NT4.0 only. It had to be installed and configured manually; there was no setup wizard nor any configuration software. These components were added later. Furthermore, the driver has been revised and has been ported onto the successors of Windows NT4.0.
And development is still going on...