Origin of "partition" in storage devices

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Tom Gardner

    >  You define logical disks by assigning a logical disk unit number to a
    >  file on a physical disk. You can then use the logical disk as though it
    >  were a physical disk.

To me, 'partition' implies a contiguous are of the disk; "a file" to me
implies that it might not be contiguous? Or are files contiguous in the RT-11
filesystem? (I know there were filesystems which supported contiguous files.)

This reminds me of the swapping/paging area in Windows 95/98 (maybe other
versions too), which was kept in a file, and therefore might be scattered all
over the physical disk. (Norton disk optimizer would coalesce the swap/paging
area to a contiguous area of the disk.)

	Noel