DOS extender
A major difference between PMODE and other popular extenders is its small footprint, making it feasible to embed the whole of PMODE to the DOS-extended executable, increasing its size by approximately 10 (binary) kilobytes, and compression (see executable compression) is supported for further reduction of the storage footprint (but not run-time memory requirement). PMODE is therefore often appropriate where size is an issue (which it usually was on old computer systems), but there is also the advantage of eliminating the external dependency on a separate(*) DOS extender (the presence of which certainly cannot be taken for granted - for instance in DOS-based "rescue disk" environments). (Most other extenders, such as DOS4G/W, require that a small real mode program (called a stub) was attached to the beginning of the protected mode executable; a stub that would locate and load the external DOS extender executable, such as DOS4GW.EXE).