Visual C++ Tips » MZ http://weseetips.com Gold mine of Visual C++ tricks! Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:09:08 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= Do you know what is MZ? http://weseetips.com/2008/03/24/do-you-know-what-is-an-mz/ http://weseetips.com/2008/03/24/do-you-know-what-is-an-mz/#comments Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:53:50 +0000 Jijo Raj http://weseetips.wordpress.com/?p=27 Icon Description
If you open any windows executable in some text editor you can see the executable starts with two chars – “MZ”. Do you know what it is ?

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Windows executables are in PE( Portable Executable) file format. For backward compatibility with dos, the PE file format contains a small MS-DOS stub in the starting. That’s why when we run any windows application in DOS, it just print an error message that, it needs windows to execute the application.

The dos header starts with a special signature – “MZ”. MZ stands for Mark Zbikowski. He is one of the earlier Microsoft Architects and the designer of Dos Executable file format. In 2006 he was honored for 25 years of service with the company, the first employee to reach this milestone other than Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer :) Digging history is Interesting… isn’t it ?

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