It was natural for these developers to use existing code to quickly bootstrap the new Windows NT platform. While code is just code, there are multiple types of data. The file alignment of sections in the executable file can have a significant impact on the resulting file size. Some obvious examples are the imports, exports, resources, and base relocations. The term "Portable Executable" was chosen because the intent was to have a common file format for all flavors of Windows, on all supported CPUs.
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