[TUHS] the first busybox

[Marc Donner via TUHS]

When Ken and Dennis created exec() they established the convention that
argv[0] held the name by which the program was called.  Early uses of the
argv[0] value to adjust behavior was reported with ex and vi as well as
compress and uncompress in the 1970s.  I bet we have source references for
that somewhere.
=====
[I write my own messages.  Never from AI.]
exploringaimatters.com
nygeek.net


On Thu, Oct 22, 2026 at 12:12 PM Dan Cross via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 22, 2026 at 1:46 AM 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 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"?
>
> I remember seeing something like that with "miniroots", that were
> meant to be written to a swap partition from a standalone loader, and
> then you'd boot from swap.  I think the IBM RT used that to do
> installation, or possibly very low-level repair of a busted
> filesystem.  I doubt that predates the Sun window system, though: IBM
> was late getting thus underpowered boat anchors to market, so I'd
> imagine the technique was pretty well-known by then.
>
>         - Dan C.
>