In those days, a "patch" didn't mean a source-code diff; at least, not in the systems I worked on. We got binary patches. I think they were packaged for use with a program we called "patch", but you could definitely apply them with a hex editor, in a pinch.
We got patches for the OS itself this way. But we didn't have access to the OS source, nor the build tools - the OS was written in a proprietary ALGOL derivative, and we didn't have the compiler.
I was once shown how to patch the COBOL compiler so that you could produce programs that couldn't be written in COBOL, things like messing with IO ports.
In those days, a "patch" didn't mean a source-code diff; at least, not in the systems I worked on. We got binary patches. I think they were packaged for use with a program we called "patch", but you could definitely apply them with a hex editor, in a pinch.
We got patches for the OS itself this way. But we didn't have access to the OS source, nor the build tools - the OS was written in a proprietary ALGOL derivative, and we didn't have the compiler.
I was once shown how to patch the COBOL compiler so that you could produce programs that couldn't be written in COBOL, things like messing with IO ports.