Alaric Snell-Pym on Nostr: 🤤 My own hunger for punched cards came from a book about linkers and executable ...

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My own hunger for punched cards came from a book about linkers and executable file formats; the OS/360 executable format traced its origins back to punched cards. The compiler would output a stack of cards for each module you compile, and the input to the linker would be those stacks concatenated, with control cards added to set options and stuff. I presume a lot of stuff we now handle as multiple filename and option arguments to a command would have worked...