On Tue, Jan 05, 2016 at 03:29:30PM +0000, Rainer Weikusat wrote:

[cut]

>     In our installation, for example, the root directory resides
>     on the fixed-head disk, and the large disk drive, which con-
>     tains user's files, is mounted by the system initialization
>     program

>
> And considering this, the "ran ouf of space and mindlessly duplicated
> all the stuff onto a new disk" hypothesis is at least questionable when
> considering this as the 'fixed head disk' was a small, expensive,
> 'high-performance' storage device and the moving head disk a large,
> cheap and slow one. Which suggests functional reasons for the split:
> Keep the stuff needed by everyone (and the swap space) on the fast disk
> and use the slower one for 'individual users files'.
>

I am not that old but, on top of that, we should remember here that in
the beginning /usr also contained the home directories of users. This
fact, coupled with the observation that programs in /usr/bin/ in
general were not installation-dependent, made the case for a separate
/usr/

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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