On 2/23/2006 at 7:05 PM Kelly Leavitt wrote:
 I just imaged a disk of an MS-DOS compatible computer
(Tandy 2000). Does
anyone here know the magic number of an exe under ms-dos 2.0? I had 
assumed
 that it was MZ, like current exe files, but I only see
2 or 3 occurrences
of this in the entire data stream from the disk. On the plus side, I see 
LOTS
 of strings that tell me I have actually read the
contents of the disk 
(this
 machine used DS/QD drives). 
Why does this surprise you?  I think that it'd be safe to say that the
preponderance of executables in the old 2.0 and before days were .COM
files.  But AFAIK, it's always been MZ--though I can check my DOS 2.0 and
DOS 1.1 docs for you.
Cheers,
Chuck