[TUHS] the first busybox

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 11:46 PM ron minnich via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> The first busybox I recall using was on Sun systems (SuntTools?) where many
> window applications were linked into one binary.
>

I believe then that SunView was the name. I seem to recall it did this
because there
was no shared library support and the toolkit was large relative to the
clients that
were linked together.


> I may have got the various names wrong; it's been 35 years. But I'm
> wondering: did something predate that?
>
> What was the "first busybox"?


It was released with SunOs 3.0.

However, I see on the SunView wiki that SunWindows preceded it in 1983, but
was much more limited.

Maybe define busybox a bit better? What are you looking for? There were
several old-time
unix programs that behaved differently depending on which hard link you ran
them with, but
that was much more limited than busybox that massages the .o files to give
each a namespace
and includes a first level dispatch so you can call foo_main().

Warner