GCOS field

[Guy Harris]

>In my flavor of unix, that's described as the "Comment" field.

Well, sort of.  Actually, in the 4.BSD "struct passwd", there are both
"pw_comment" *and* "pw_gecos" fields; the former is set to point to a
null string, and the latter is set to point to the GCOS/comment/full
name/whatever field.  The S5R3.1 one also has both those fields in
"struct passwd"; it sets them both to point to the GCOS/comment/full
name/whatever field.

>Elsewhere in the old green books, I get the implicit, not explicit,
>information that GCOS referred to a typesetting system at Murray Hill at
>the time that Osanna & Co. were inventing troff.

Actually, GCOS was the operating system on the machine on which the
typesetting stuff ran.  I think it was originally GECOS, for GE
Csomething Operating System, for the GE 6*5 series ("*" replaceable by
3, and perhaps by other digits, except 4 - if you replace it with 4, it
runs Multics instead).  When Honeywell bought out GE's computer
operation, they probably dropped the "E".