In the version of the paper linked earlier in the forum, I take the following to mean two passes: build a model and then use lessons learned to build the final product. But it's a matter of interpretation and semantics. My own interpretation is contradicted further down in my comment by someone from that era (see the Larman paper linked). C'est la vie, I'm sticking with my interpretation. I think we can agree that Royce did not mean our modern "Agile" approach.

"If the computer program in question is being developed for the first time, arrange matters so that the version finally delivered to the customer for operational deployment is actually the second version insofar as critical design/operations areas are concerned."

At least 2 methodologies existed before Royce's paper as described in this paper: Waterfall and "iterative and incremental".(http://www.craiglarman.com/wiki/downloads/misc/history-of-it...)

Note that, in the section referencing DoD-Std-2167, the author of the DoD standard does state explicitly that he understood Waterfall to be one-pass. Certainly he implicitly promoted it as such.

Have you ever seen water jump back up a few stages of a waterfall? (Hint: no.) It's called the Waterfall model exactly because that kind of thing is explicitly not part of it (see Figure 2 in the Royce paper linked above). That's the whole point of the name.

It goes without saying that no software development effort has ever lived up to this standard. Nonetheless, the fact that it is not possible to develop non-trivial designs (for software or anything else) like this in no way prevented people from advocating it as the "ideal" design process.