It's well known that most programs had automatic memory deallocation in the before times: your tool would call malloc, process its input, and let the OS free me

It's well known that most programs had automatic memory deallocation in the before times: your tool would call malloc, process its input, and let the OS free memory as soon as it exited. But some of the fanciest programs, like the Bourne Shell, were even more automatic: they didn't have to manually manage each allocation either. You'd simply write right on the heap and have your SIGSEGV handler do a brk() every so often!