The DOS world's need for memory grew and the 64KB available to .COM executables was no longer adequate. The NE "new executable" executable file format was invented and uses the .EXE file extension rather than .COM. The first 2 bytes of these files includes a tag at the front to identify the format and if you guessed that this was "NE" to denote "new executable", you'd be incorrect. The first 2 bytes of every .EXE file are "MZ" famously because the name of the programmer at Microsoft who wrote the code was "Mark Zbikowski".
In the beginning, the DOS .COM file format was the format for executables of size less than 64KB and let's face it, who would really need more. I'm headed down a path to discuss PE file format executables and no good discussion is right without a foundation. In the beginning, there was DOS; life was simple and there was nothing between you and the computer. This post describes the early executable .COM file format showing code, data, everything that you need for small executables!
Had an interesting one today when outlook 2016 prompted me to permit a website to configurre email settings for a user that isn't me. In this case, it was for a user that doesn't work at my company anymore and this lead me to ponder if someone in IT was trying to connect me to the no longer here user's email inbox. Answer, no.
Net Neutrality is an emotional subject. It sounds like it is about equality and liberty for all, but that’s a simplification. As a foundation thought, this is not about “equality”, it is about which federal agency regulates the Internet, the FCC or the FTC? Read this post and I hope it will bring some clarity to the discussion, and help the folks on both sides of the polar topic realize that they have more in common than they thought - keep the internet free!
RIFF (.wav) file format has been around unchanged since the early 1990s and still in common use today. This goes back to a time when CD audio formats were king and RIFF .wav follows the red book convention pretty closely, with the change that the number of channels, bits per sample and samples per second can vary as described in the file header.
As an example file, I have selected TADA.WAV from Windows 10, \windows\media\tada.wav. This file is 285,228 bytes, the important part is in the first 44 bytes shown here.