What is the MZ signature in a PE file for?

Question

I\'m working on a program that will parse a PE object for various pieces of information.

Reading the specifications though, I cannot find out why the MZ bytes are there,

Answer 1

As I see it, by reading the wikipedia article and Iczelion's PE Tutorial, it is there just to keep up compatibility and enable dos or HX DOS Extender to execute certain code next to the MZ header.

From devsource one can find more information like MZ stands for Mark Zbikowski, one of MS-DOS's developers. And how the operating system behaves and handles the data from the MZ header.