> (1) V7 did not use a MMU, there are no shared object libraries. The whole stack feels simpler, less layered. It is straightforward to hand-craft a binary on a

> (1) V7 did not use a MMU, there are no shared object libraries. The whole stack feels simpler, less layered. It is straightforward to hand-craft a binary on a pre-ELF system. It is strightforward or not quite. V7 on the PDP-11, even those with the MMU, had a 64kB process address space limitation (actually, I think it was 56kB); therefore, the solution was the overlay linking (a cheap and nasty implementation of memory paging in the user space) for applications that could not fit into the fixed address space which was pretty arcane to get right. If the code accidentally crossed the overlay boundary, it would result in the application entering a death spiral of discarding a chunk of address space to replace it with the next overlay to discard the loaded overlay almost immediately and load the previous overlay back into the address space and start over again.