[saretired]

It appears that only calloc was in Lesk's Portable C Library [0] while malloc was the name Thompson gave the kernel's memory allocator in V6 [1]. When Ritchie rewrote Lesk's library for V7, he may have simply retained calloc for backward compatibility with existing user space code. [0] http://roguelife.org/~fujita/COOKIES/HISTORY/V6/iolib.html [1] https://github.com/hephaex/unix-v6/blob/master/ken/malloc.c