On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 5:47 PM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

I thought "ld" stood for Link eDitor. :-)

I have never heard that justification. It's always been talked about as the "loader" communications I had with different folks including Dennis. In the early/mid '70s the person that introduced me to Unix (tjk) always called it the loader. Ted was (like many of us in those days) coming from either IBM's TSS or MTS, and influenced by IBM's terminology as well as DECs.

On OS/8 there

were four linkers, one for each compiler: ABSLDR, LOAD, LOADER,
and LINK. LINK was for the macro assembler, the last one published.

I used TSS/8 and I've forgotten what is was called there, never used OS/8. In TOPS and Tenex land it was called a linker, as it was on TSS and MTS.

I don't remember the story on the various PDP-11 DEC OSes;

RT-11, DOS-11 and RSX all called it a linker.

by VMS days

it was exclusively LINK.

As the author of VMS's link and later versions, I'll try to ask Paul tomorrow what he knows/remembers. In my presence, he has b*tched about Unix calling it a 'loader.

Clem