Make that libc or the X libraries or any other large chunk of code that was replicated over and over again in every linked binary. The principle remains the same, and yes, it predates Linux by a comfortable margin.
I'm trying to remember if the old mainframe I worked on had it but I'm not 100% sure.
I worked with a PDP/11 running Unix in the 80's and it definitely did not have dynamic linking. All the library files were simply linked to the executables and stripped of symbols before shipping to save space.
Anybody here have VAX 11/7XX experience? I wonder how it was on other DEC products.
Dynamic (with and without relocation) linking far predates the existence of glibc, much less Linux, by decades.