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Re:Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed ... by mzs on Thursday September 15, 2016 @03:10PM (#12508910)
And with 077213 and 012345 octal that is what happens. That's why the distribution was so uniform when Ken checked.
Re:Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed ... by userbinator on Thursday September 15, 2016 @11:05PM (#12511570)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear-feedback_shift_register...

I suspect it was deliberately chosen to do this for the purposes of testing the disk; the sequence is random-looking so it exercises all the bits, but is also deterministic so that written data can be verified by reading it back and comparing without having to store a copy of all the written data somewhere else.