Comment by wahern

> Honestly, I wish I could ask the person who designed it, why they made such decisions.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250115051355/https://www.bell-...

https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/sieve/sieve.pdf

https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/index.html#origins

They also include citations to papers by Thompson, Bourne, and others.