maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) (03/10/89)
BSS (uninitialized data sections) - It was from an IBM assembly-language mnemonic by the same name, which stood for `Block Started by Symbol' (Block Storage Segment?) GECOS - General Electric Comprehensive Operating System/ General Electric Computer Operating System GCOS - When the large systems division was sold to Honeywell, they dropped the E from GECOS. the gcos field - Sometimes we sent printer output or batch jobs to the GCOS machines. The gcos field in the password file was a place to stash the information for the $IDENT card. Not elegant. (Dennis Ritchie) nroff, troff - `roff' was the original program, and stood for `RunOFF'. troff = typesetter roff nroff = new roff tee - T = T-formed pipe splitter cat - short for catenate, one of the approximately 10 primordial Unix commands C/A/T - Computer Aided Typesetter not to be confused with the cat command spool - Simultaneous Peripheral Output On Line/ Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On Line -- Those against Rushdie haven't |Maarten Litmaath @ VU Amsterdam: learned anything from the Dark Ages. |maart@cs.vu.nl, mcvax!botter!maart