Linkers and loaders have been part of the software toolkit almost as long
as there have been computers, since they are the critical tools that permit
programs to be built from modules rather than as one big monolith.
As early as 1947, programmers started to use primitive loaders that could
take program routines stored on separate tapes and combine and relocate
them into one program. By the early 1960s, these loaders had evolved into
full-fledged linkage editors. Since program memory remained expensive
and limited and computers were (by modern standards) slow, these linkers
contained complex features for creating complex memory overlay struc-
tures to cram large programs into small memory, and for re-editing previ-
ously linked programs to save the time needed to rebuild a program from
scratch.
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