It turns out that while a maximum of 8 partitions may be what people
"should" have had, you can actually fit up to 18 entries(*) in a sector.
And some people clearly were taking advantage of that, like Michael
Cree, who had ten partitions on one of his OSF disks.
(*) The OSF partition data starts at byte offset 64 in the first sector,
and the array of 16-byte partition entries start at offset 148 in
the on-disk partition structure.