BSS

[William J. Laubenheimer]

The first place I encountered the abbreviation was on a PDP-8, where it
was an assembler pseudo-op standing for "Block Started by Symbol", referring
to the fact that any symbol associated with the declaration took as its
address the first address reserved for the block. PDP-11's had the same
pseudo-op, plus a complementary one, BES = "Block Ended by Symbol",
in which the symbol took the address of the first location after the
area reserved. I presume that this is the source for the name.

                  ____                  Bill Laubenheimer
      ___       /      \       ___      UC-Berkeley Computer Science
     /   \     |  o  o  |     /   \     ucbvax!wildbill
------+++----------()----------+++------
          ...Killjoy was here!