Origin of "partition" in storage devices

I suspect CLV was invented for CDs, in fact. The reason is obvious: CDs contain uncompressed digital audio, i.e., constant bit rate. If you want to avoid big buffers -- an expensive thing to have in 1980s consumer electronics -- the bits have to come off the media at essentially the desired payload data rate. So you either use CAV with constant sector counts, which wastes a whole lot of capacity given that the ratio of inner to outer radius is quite large on a CD, or you go to CLV. The variable rotation rate is easy enough to handle because CDs are accessed sequentially; the speed change on track switch is small because track switches are only by +1 (during play). You can often hear the RPM changes clearly, if you're asking the CD player to do random access by skipping around the songs. paul