Dd is not a disk writing tool (2015) 10 years ago
"Legend has it that the intended name, “cc”, was taken by the C compiler, so the letters were shifted by one to give “dd”."
Legend is wrong, this clearly derived from the mainframe JCL DD command. This is also why the syntax is so non unix-like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Control_Language#In-stream...