How to write and executable Windows .exe manually (machine code with Hex editor)?
I'd like to know how is it possible to write something as simple as an Hello World program just by using an Hex Editor. I know that I could use an assembler and assembly language to this at a near machine level but I just want to experiment with really writing machine code in a toy example such as Hello World.
This could be a simple DOS .COM file that I can run on DOSBox. But it would be nice if someone could provide an example for an .EXE file for running it directly on my Windows PC.
This is just pure curiosity. No... I'm not thinking of writing programs directly in binary machine code (I don't even usually write assembly code, I just use C/C++ as my most low level tools most of the time). I just want to see if that's possible to do it, because probably someone had to do it in the very early days of computers.
P.S.: I know that there are similar questions about this topic around but none provide a working example. I just want a simple example so that it can help me understand how compilers and assemblers generate an executable file. I mean... someone must have done this by hand in the past for the very first programs. Also, for the Windows EXE format there must have been someone at Microsoft that wrote the first tools to generate the format and the way that Windows itself reads it and then executes it.
Answer
There's a quite minimalistic but fully working (on Win7, too) exe on corkami/wiki/PE101, every byte of it is explained in the nice graphic. You can type it all by hand in a hex editor, but the paddings may make that a little tedious.
As for the history, yes someone at Microsoft invented the exe format (the old DOS MZ exe format) and he (or someone else at Microsoft) wrote a loader for it and a linker, which is the thing that traditionally turns the output of a compiler ("object files") into executable files. It's possible (and even likely, I would say) that the first exe programs were written by hand, after all they were only meant to test the new loader.
Later, AT&T's COFF format was extended by Microsoft to the PE format, which still has the MZ header and typically (but optionally, it's not in the corkami example, and it can be anything really) includes a small DOS program just to print the message "This program cannot be run in DOS mode".