henry (05/14/82)
The impression I have is that ctime *started out* to be the creation time and was later changed to be the "change time", presumably because this was more useful (I agree!). I definitely heard "creation time" a while before the V7 release. Bear in mind that the Murray Hill research system's kernel is fairly dynamic, and what we got on the V7 distribution is merely a snapshot of an ongoing evolutionary process.