[puetzk]

Relatedly, GCC/binutils still has a `.ident` assembly directive (https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/as/Ident.html) and `#ident` preprocessor command (https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cpp/Other-Directives.html) that emit data into an ELF .comment for `what` to read...

[wpollock]

The original name was .SCCS. I put the SCCS strings in there to save memory. In the early 1980s, the 3B20 computers used to manage the U.S. phone network had a 32MiB memory limit. By 1985 the network had outgrown that memory limit, by just a few kilobytes. So I hacked the C compiler to look for #(*) strings and put them into .SCCS rather than .data. Since .SCCS didn't load into memory by default, I saved just enough to run one more process! Each binary was built from about 2,000 source files, so those strings added up to a significant amount of memory.

This was at Bell Labs Columbus Ohio. Also, I think it was COFF and not ELF. Used System V r2.