7z can't do the exe bit I don't think, but it can make split archives of arbitrary size (in bytes).

Providing executable packages is a terrible practice anyway and should be discouraged. It reinforces the view that it's OK to execute random untrusted programs just to get a document, the most popular assumption abused by malware developers.

I can't deny that that's true.

It's inconvenient too, as nothing in this house runs Windows right now, and extracting custom fancy EXEs* can get annoying.

(*: Most archivers can reopen the EXEs they create as par the course, and there are lots of extractors and unpackers out there, but I vaguely remember a few incidents where I wanted to extract an executable archive/installer of some kind and couldn't. In some cases pushing the EXE through Wine worked.)

I believe winzip had the same feature of creating a exe zip spanning over multiple files, for using on floppies.

I only remember using that feature when zipping something up myself and it would have you keep inserting floppies as needed. I'm sure you could then post images of the floppies for distribution but I never really saw that done. It was always .r00, .r01, etc on usenet.

True, though i think the making scheme of rar was more helpful. Also, rar compressed various file formats (video and audio specifically) better.