Also in the 90s...

I remember they were HP Bobcats. We had two of them in a student lab and user directories weren't on a separate partition... so things filled up. And they kept getting filled up.

One of the people who ran the lab found that he could get back a couple of hundred kilobytes by running strip on all of the various things he wrote.

    find . -type f -executable -exec strip {} \;

So he ran it in the root directory too and was pleased to find many megabytes more of space was available.

... Did you know that .so files are executable? ... And the kernel too?

Things that were statically compiled worked. But anything that was dynamically compiled failed. And when the machine was rebooted... it was really unhappy with being unable to find the linking information for the kernel.

Had to go beg a tape reinstall of the OS to get it working again.

(and then there was the story of the guy who bought a NeXT and thought that the "bin" guy was taking up too much space)

With the default arguments in the 1990s strip wouldn’t strip “linking information” it would just strip debugging symbols. You wouldn’t have been able to debug a core dump say but dynamically linked binaries would have been totally fine.