Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!EU.net!sun4nl!phcoms4.seri.philips.nl!news From: Jim Reid <jim@pc37.mpn.cp.philips.com> 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? Date: 15 May 1997 14:55:02 +0200 Organization: Origin TS Intranet Services, Eindhoven Lines: 11 Distribution: inet Message-ID: <x7911guc7t.fsf@pc37.mpn.cp.philips.com> References: <5kd2ng$c8b$1@rzsun02.rrz.uni-hamburg.de> <Pine.SUN.3.95.970513170134.19438A-100000@omni2> <Pine.GSO.3.96.970513200952.7143D-100000@tree.Stanford.EDU> <EA6HHD.AAF@serval.net.wsu.edu> <EA7MIG.6JD@zebra.alphacdc.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: pc37.mpn.cp.philips.com X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.shell:44983 comp.os.linux.misc:175384 comp.os.linux.x:61600 alt.os.linux:21165 comp.unix.bsd.misc:3236 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:40935 gnu.misc.discuss:31274 comp.unix.solaris:106566 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.