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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>
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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