On Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 11:23:05AM -0400, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:

And almost exactly two decades after Sun/Caldera killed Wabi - the
Windows-16 Application Binary Interface for Solaris/Linux. Funny how
things come around …

Remember when Linux had a layer to run x86 BSD binaries?  Now freebsd
can run linux binaries instead.  I think it was called iBCS back in
the day.

http://www.skrenta.com/rt/man/iBCS.9.html

Yes: intel defined a standard mechanism, which everyone did variations on. It was therefor to put in an "interpreter" for different OSs, where interpreter meant the code that interprets systems calls and dispatched them.  I remember looking over Drew's shoulder at the code for SCO binaries. Solaris 86 had an interpreter for Linux, Linux an interpreter for Solaris 86.

--dave

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain