I came across a website that discusses reviving an old binary for Lotus 1-2-3 for SysV Unix (386 COFF), on the way to making it run on Linux:
https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html
The audience here may enjoy the read, and maybe it is of use when reviving other old application software for 1980’s and 1990’s Unix.
The key part I think is this:
Quote:
"Yikes - it’s an original unstripped object file from 1-2-3. There are nearly 20,000 symbols including private symbols and debug information.
Why would Lotus ship this? It’s so big it must have required them to phyiscally ship an extra disk to every customer? Could it have been a mistake, accidentally left on the final release image?
I had so many questions, but I’m not old enough to have any experience with SysV, so I asked the greybeards on alt.folklore.computers if they had seen this before and why this might have happened.
The answer was that this is probably deliberate - dlopen() was not widely available on UNIX in the early 90s, so there was no easy way to load native plugins or extensions. To solve this, vendors would ship a bunch of partially linked object files with a script to relink them with your extensions – Clever!"
