HIEW Hex editor tutorials series , part 1 – the history.

The story of this hex editor started in the dark 90-s. The first name was ViHE (Viewer-HexEditor) and was released by its author Eugene Suslikov as a free software in early 1991. As he stated back then “for occasional looking into and changing few bytes in a file, like 7xh -> EBh”. Later that year the name changed to Hiew (Hacker's view), still being the free software and also it supported DOS and OS/2. As the researching software protection and circumventing it deemed back then to be the best way to learn assembly and programming, the disassemblers and hex editors got popularity and fame. Starting 1999 and version 6.15 the HIEW became shareware. The last version to support OS/2 was 6.85 in the year 2002. Along the shareware version author started providing the demo version with limited features. The current version is 8.53 and has the following features:

• Can open/view files of any size
• Has built in disassembler, not a competitor to the IDA but still pretty good Supports 32/64-bit executables
• Knows ELF/COFF/NE (16-bit, pretty rare today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Executable) / LE (Successor of the NE, used in OS/2 and Windows Vxd http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Linear_Executable / LX OS/2 successor of the NE format / Mach-O)
• Search of the strings/hex values/ASM instructions
• Simple crypt/decrypt system
• Keyboard macros
• HIEW External Module support allows to extend the functionality by exposing the API
• ARMv6 disassembler

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