[TUHS] Re: Historical application software

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Thu, Jun 2, 2022, 8:00 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson@eschatologist.net>
wrote:

> On May 28, 2022, at 5:57 PM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> >
> > HP-UX had a weird form of COFF in the early days. IBM AIX had its own
> thing that wasn't quite COFF, nor was it quite a.out. Apollo also had a
> variation on COFF that wasn't quite standard. I wrote a symbol mangler for
> all of these in the early 90s and each one was its own special snowflake.
>
> HP initially used its own object file format for 32-bit PA-RISC, whether
> running HP-UX or MPE. I believe it's still the format the ROM expects for
> anything bootable, at least it is for my MPE-capable A400.
>
> IBM's COFF for AIX on POWER and PowerPC was XCOFF, which was also used as
> the initial object file format (though not executable format) for the Power
> Macintosh. Apple's Preferred Executable Format was essentially a mechanical
> translation away from IBM's XCOFF; the initial toolchains produced .o files
> and then a "final" binary in XCOFF format, and then ran a MakePEF tool on
> that to produce the PEF binary for an executable or shared library. I
> believe Be, due in part to their heritage and toolchains, also used PEF for
> BeOS on PowerPC.
>
> And then there's the "b.out" format used by i960…
>

There were a number of b.out formats used by PC C compilers...

Warner

  -- Chris
>
>

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