gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (05/08/88)
In article <1988May6.165741.633@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >This may have been aimed at things like standalone diagnostics rather >than normal Unix programs, ... Yes, it was also useful for bootstraps that had to fit entirely into one 512-byte block. That way no code had to be "wasted" to skip the header when rolling an a.out into memory, and the result could be started by branching to its first location.