4 Sep
2023
4 Sep
'23
3:57 p.m.
Recently, I was looking into the “Das U-Boot” boot loader package. Summarised with great
simplification, u-boot bundles device drivers, file systems, commands and a Bourne-like
shell into a standalone package. Normally it auto-runs a script that brings up a system,
but when used in interactive mode it allows a great deal of poking around.
It made me think of the “standalone” set of programs for installing early Unix. On 16-bit
understandably each basic command has to be a separate standalone program, but after the
shift to 32-bit bundling more functionality in a single binary would have become
possible.
How did the Unix “standalone” package evolve in the 80’s, both in the research and BSD
lineages? Is there any retrospective paper about that? Or is it a case of “Use the source,
Luke”?