I think tab and table come from the same root. Tab stops existed on typewriters prior to tab keys on terminal keyboards, and I presume it was a shortening of ta

I think tab and table come from the same root. Tab stops existed on typewriters prior to tab keys on terminal keyboards, and I presume it was a shortening of tabulation stop, i.e. a way to more easily input data in a tabular form or a table. So I always internally read fstab as "file system table" and crontab as "chronology table", or something similar.