VBinDiff was inspired by the Compare Files function of the ProSel utilities by Glen Bredon, for the Apple II. When I couldn’t find a similar utility for the PC, I wrote it myself.
The single-file mode was inspired by the LIST utility of 4DOS and friends. While less provides a good line-oriented display, it has no equivalent to LIST’s hex display. (True, you can pipe the file through hexdump, but that’s incredibly inefficient on multi-gigabyte files.).