Nobody is distributing that library anymore. Whereas an equivalently aged binary on Windows will load today without extra dependencies.
I would think that the kernel would have dropped binfmt_aout by now, but I just looked and it's still there. Wonder if any distros build it.
> Nobody is distributing that library anymore.
There exist plenty of archives of old Linux distributions. "Nobody" turns out to be quite a lot of people/servers.
> Whereas an equivalently aged binary on Windows will load today without extra dependencies.
I wouldn't go so far. The 64-bit port of Windows dropped support for all 16-bit applications, whereas they still run flawlessly through Wine.
Yes, and having an a.out interpreter is just another dependency.
> Then, the last time I tried to run a binary from the 90s, it required libc5, from the days before distros switched to glibc.
It's a library. libc is versioned like everything else.