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Traditional assembler, and higher level compilers work with several memory segments, according to intended use. Hence, there is a data segment, a stack segment, a bss, and text segment. The text segment is also called the code segment.
Text segment? For machine code?
I have asked all the old-timers I could find, how something as unreadable as machine code came to be know as the "text segment". Every one of them agreed that, that was really what it was called, but none of them seemed to be surprised by it. And no one could offer an explanation.
Here's your chance to show off your geek history knowledge by enlightening us.
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Text segmentation is the process of dividing written text into meaningful units, such as words, sentences, or topics. The term applies both to mental processes used by humans when reading text, and to artificial processes implemented in computers, which are the subject of natural language processing.
Text segmentation is a method of splitting a document into smaller parts, which is usually called segments. It is widely used in text processing. Each segment has its relevant meaning. Those segments categorized as word, sentence, topic, phrase or any information unit depending on the task of the text analysis.
A text segment, also known as a code segment or simply as text, is one of the sections of a program in an object file or in memory, which contains executable instructions. As a memory region, a text segment may be placed below the heap or stack in order to prevent heaps and stack overflows from overwriting it.
In computing, a code segment, also known as a text segment or simply as text, is a portion of an object file or the corresponding section of the program's virtual address space that contains executable instructions.
Going a little further with nos's comments, I turned up a scanned version of the GE-635 Programming Manual, and found the following in the section on the macro assembler:
The GE-625/635 Macro Assembler is being provided to give the professional programmers some of the conveniences of a compiler and the flexibility of an Assembler. [...] The output options enable him to obtain binary text in relocatable as well as absolute formats.
So, it appears that the use of "binary text" was a GE colloquialism, or perhaps a commonly used term at the time (remember that those were the days when card readers/punches were used for much IO). So, one possible path is GE, to Multics via GE-645, to Unix via Bell Labs' work on Multics, to Linux.
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