That brings back some memories...
Back in the 90s, there was a whole scene around exe/com compression and protection tools. ("Protection" in the sense that people figured out if they compress their executables, that also mean you cannot simply modify strings in them any more, and that was expanded to all kinds of anti-debugging protection. However, it never lasted long until the next unpacker was able to break it.)
I never acquired the skills to write such tools myself, but I wrote a detection tool and ran a mailing list.
Or in other wors, in case you were around at that time: I'm the author of chkexe and ran the exe mailing list.
