At my first job (94-97) we were writing a (16bit) Windows application that was a relatively slim EXE and several hundred DLLs. This wasn't necessarily the mainstream approach, but it was supported just fine by the tools. What didn't really exist was a mechanism to safely use DLLs from 3rd parties, and sometimes even from MS. DLL hell was very real, but shared objects in any system will always have the same challenge. You are at the mercy of the module writer not breaking binary compatibility without bumping a version number (or part thereof)
