MZ
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| Executable Formats |
|---|
| Microsoft |
| *nix |
| Apple |
The MS-DOS EXE format, also known as MZ after its signature (after the initials of Microsoft engineer Mark Zbykowski) was introduced with MS-DOS 2.0 (MS-DOS 1.0 only sported the simple COM format). DOS-MZ was designed to be run in real mode and reflects this, having a relocation table of SEGMENT:OFFSET pairings. A very simple format that can be run at any offset, it does not distinguish between TEXT, DATA and BSS. Since it was designed to run in real mode, its maximum file size of code + data + bss is 1MB.
Only DOS and Windows use this format natively, but there are several free DOS emulators that support it for various operating systems (e.g. Linux, Amiga, etc.)