> Was a disassembler ever considered part of the standard binary objects
> toolkit with the assembler, linker, etc. or was that the sort of thing that
> was more niche and therefore just kinda cropped up when/if someone decided
> to write one?


There was a Vax decompiler around the time of 4.2BSD that was available
from some university (Utah?). It was commonly used to decompile Peter
Langston's empire program so it could be run on a bunch of the other Unix
minicomputers that were available at that time.  (E.g., we ran it on
Pyramid's)