On Wednesday, 9 December 2015 at 19:23:07 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 5:47 PM, John Cowan
<cowan(a)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.
My understanding, which predates my contact with Unix, is that the
original toochains for single-job machines consisted of the assembler
or compiler, the output of which was loaded directly into core with
the loader. As things became more complicated (and slow), it made
sense to store the memory image somewhere on drum, and then load that
image directly when you wanted to run it. And that in some systems
the name "loader" stuck, even though it no longer loaded. Something
like the modern ISP use of the term "modem" to mean "router". But I
don't have anything to back up this version; comments welcome.
Greg
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