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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!uunet!in1.uu.net!206.13.28.13!news.pbi.net!news.dp.beckman.com!inet.dp.beckman.com!brooks-kachner!bjkachner Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.x,alt.os.linux,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.unix.solaris Subject: Re: unix acronyms -collecting a list? Message-ID: <bjkachner.6.00077D7F@ccgate.dp.beckman.com> From: bjkachner@ccgate.dp.beckman.com (B Kachner) Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 07:29:21 References: <5kd2ng$c8b$1@rzsun02.rrz.uni-hamburg.de> <x7911guc7t.fsf@pc37.mpn.cp.philips.com> Distribution: inet Organization: Beckman Instruments, Inc. NNTP-Posting-Host: 134.217.101.122 X-Newsreader: Trumpet for Windows [Version 1.0 Rev A] Lines: 26 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.shell:45058 comp.os.linux.misc:175649 comp.os.linux.x:61758 alt.os.linux:21232 comp.unix.bsd.misc:3276 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:41054 gnu.misc.discuss:31316 comp.unix.solaris:106710 In article <x7911guc7t.fsf@pc37.mpn.cp.philips.com> Jim Reid <jim@pc37.mpn.cp.philips.com> writes: >Subject: Re: unix acronyms -collecting a list? >From: Jim Reid <jim@pc37.mpn.cp.philips.com> >Date: 15 May 1997 14:55:02 +0200 >vern@zebra.alphacdc.com (Vern Hoxie) writes: >> 'bss' was the name of a register on the IBM mainframe used to run early >> UNIX by Ritchie et al. >Nope. Early UNIX systems did not run on IBM mainframes. The name BSS - >Block Symbol by Segment I think was the acronym - derives from some >dinosaur OS from the 70's (IBM?) where it referred to a chunk of a >process's address space that was zeroed at startup. This was more or >less the same thing as the uninitialised data segment of a UNIX >process. BSS - Block Started by Symbol, to reserve a block of un-initialized memory, with the label assigned to the first word. BES - Block Ended by Symbol, to assign the label to the last word of the block. These were common to assemblers for early IBM machines, ie 1620, 1130, 709/7090/7094 late 50's early 60's