According to a paper in the manual, written by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie:When an I/O request is made to a file whose i-node indicates that it is special, the last 12 device address words are immaterial, and the first specifies an internal device name, which is interpreted as a pair of numbers representing, respectively, a device type and subdevice number. The device type indicates which system routine will deal with I/O on that device; the subdevice number selects, for example, a disk drive attached to a particular controller or one of several similar terminal interfaces.The Linux documentation on mass storage describes major and minor device numbers:When accessing a device file, the major number selects which device driver is being called to perform the input/output operation. This call is being done with the minor number as a parameter and it is entirely up to the driver how the minor number is being interpreted. The driver documentation usually describes how the driver uses minor numbers.I'm wondering if these two literatures describe the same concept.  It's somewhat confusing.
Are the major and minor numbers of a device the same as the device type and subdevice number describe in the Version 7 Unix Manual?
devices