Hi John.

13-Apr-04 15:44:41, John Tserkezis wrote to All


 JT> GMT Gecko/2004021 From: John Tserkezis 
 JT> Reply-To: Fidonet AVtech Echo 

 JT> David Drummond wrote:

 PQ>> "MZ" stands for Mark Zbikowksi who was the principal
architect of
 PQ>> DOS.

 >> What ever the guy's name, I do not think the mere prepending of the
 >> letters
 JT> M
 >> to something will make it actually execute.

 JT> If the file extension is COM or EXE, it *WILL* execute.  _How_ it
 JT> executes depends on the first two characters.  If it's not 'MZ',
 JT> it assumes intel compiled machine code, if it IS 'MZ', then the OS
 JT> reads the header (usually 512 bytes, but could be more), and
 JT> executes code depending on how the header instructs it to do so.

 JT> The OS itself does not care if the extension is COM or EXE, and
 JT> you can in fact rename them at will, and still have it all work
 JT> correctly. (depending of course if any other applications call
 JT> those EXE's by name..).

You can actually call them with any extension you want, as long as you have
a way to point DOS's "execute binary program" function at them.

 -=> Bye <=-

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