[TUHS] inode - does it have a meaning?

[Steffen Nurpmeso via TUHS]

David Barto via TUHS wrote in
 <143E170E-F64F-4AEE-83B1-BAB134267099 at kdbarto.org>:
 |In a blog post today I read:
 |
 | In most modern file systems, those data structures are
 | known as inodes, and their numbers are inode numbers,
 | sometimes shortened to inodes. The term is thought
 | to be a contraction of index node, which certainly
 | makes sense, but is lost in the mists of time.
 |
 |This was written by a fellow who is reasonably smart and knows
 |his way around things MacOS, though not things UNIX. So before
 |I go and tell him that inode really does mean ‘index node’, I’m
 |checking here to clear the “mists of time.”
 |
 |I’ve always understood it to be a shortening of ‘index node’.
 |
 |Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode) says
 |
 | There has been uncertainty on the Linux kernel mailing list
 | about the reason for the "i" in "inode". In 2002, the question
 | was brought to Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie, who replied:[4]
 | 
 | In truth, I don't know either. It was just a term that we
 | started to use. "Index" is my best guess, because of the
 | slightly unusual file system structure that stored the
 | access information of files as a flat array on the disk,
 | with all the hierarchical directory information living
 | aside from this. Thus the i-number is an index in this array,
 | the i-node is the selected element of the array.
 | (The "i-" notation was used in the 1st edition manual;
 | its hyphen was gradually dropped.)
 |
 |Further the Wikipedia article states that Bach says that the word ‘inode’
 |is a contraction of the term index node.
 |
 |So is there a ‘definitive’ answer for this, or is it really lost in
 |the mists of time?

Sure is to me only that in 4.2BSD the "A Fast File System for
UNIX" paper (share/doc/smm/05.fastfs/) talks

  +Every file has a descriptor associated with it called an
  +.I "inode".
  +The inode contains information describing ownership of the file,
  +time stamps marking last modification and access times for the file,
  +and an array of indices that point to the data blocks for the file.
  +For the purposes of this section, we assume that the first 8 blocks
  +of the file are directly referenced by values stored
  +in the inode structure itself*.

Node with array of indices.
Isn't this an influential paper?  Not mentioned in Wikipedia.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)