My favorite dd(1) story: Back in 1979 I was an intern at NBS (now called NIST), in their computing standards division. Amongst other machines, we had a couple

My favorite dd(1) story: Back in 1979 I was an intern at NBS (now called NIST), in their computing standards division. Amongst other machines, we had a couple PDP-11 systems running v6 Unix (it was glorious). The smaller system had removable 5MB disk packs, and we did periodic backups with dd to a spare disk. It was horribly, horribly slow, and we lived with it for months until someone realized that dd bs=10 ... wasn't copying ten blocks at a time, it was copying ten bytes at a time. Whereupon backups got LOTS snappier. (That was a fun position. One of the resident Unix gurus handed me a copy of Lion's notes on my first day and basically said, "Read this and see me later", and I got to maintain and build out a whole lab full of microcomputers).