[COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days

[Adam Thornton]

Pretty sure SUPERZAP was for object files.  That was for wizardry beyond my
ken.  Normal VM service, as I recall, and I am only about 75% sure I'm
right, was in the form of source patches rather like diff files--I don't
know anymore if they were literally editor commands to transform File A
into File B, but that was the net effect--plus reassembly.  Patching the
object modules was possible, but you had to be better at it than I ever was
to pull it off.

Adam

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 8:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 11 November 2020 at 12:01:40 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> >
> >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the
> >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for a
> >> big computer was from source.  Now I've been asked for a reference, and
> >> I can't find one!  Can anybody help?
> >
> > Depends what you mean by "olden days" and "big computer".
>
> Since clarified, of course, but you're in the right track.
>
> > As I recall we (Uni of NSW) had the source to the 360/50 and the
> > Cyber 72, but not for the VMS stuff; binaries were patched with
> > IEBUPDTE and later on SUPERZAP (possibly written locally).
>
> Was SUPERZAP source or object related?  I thought the latter, but I've
> never come close to it.
>
> Greg
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