Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2026 17:35:27 -0500
From: Greg Troxel <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
| (I'm 99% sure Sixth and Seventh edition, 1976, 1978ish) had disklabels.
They didn't - or not if you mean "labels on the disks". Those systems
had "labels" (really partition tables) compiled into the various disk
drivers (one set of partitions for rm03's, another for rk07's, ...)
Those partitions usually overlapped, so different drives (or packs loaded
into drives) could have different partition schemes, but the users needed
to know which /dev entries were valid for a particular disk pack.
Labels written to the drive were a BSD invention (still earlier than
MBR's I think - DOS (no windows at the time) was still generally just
using floppies, if it existed at all).
| The 1st-stage bootloader loaded the first disk block and ran it.
If you're going far back in time, it was often from tape. Reading
from a disk tends to be a more complex set of operations than a tape.
kre
