[TUHS] Understanding the /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin Split

[Ronald Natalie]

On Feb 3, 2012, at 10:22 AM, Jose R. Valverde wrote:
> 
> 	There was a reason to separate user data from system data to avoid
> the system disk from becoming unusable by a misbehaving user.

But this wasn't practically done in the early UNIX.   Even much that was in /usr was required for normal system operation and there was stuff that got left on the root that was within the user's ability to hose up.    I was system administrator of a V6 UNIX that was used in a University setting in the late 70's.   People banging on the disks was the least of my issues.    There were far more fun ways to crash UNIX (and even PDP-11's in general), break security, etc... that I ran around trying to forestall.

In fact our /usr was on the root disk.   We had two "user" home directory drives /sys1 and /sys2 on two more RK05's. My first quota as a student was 8 blocks (4K).   I supplemented that at first with a dectape (half a megabyte) and then with my own RK05 pack (we reserved two drives for user mounted volumes).    

We swapped to an RF11 fixed head disk of about a megabyte.

The fun one was people trying to ascribe meanings to the "acronyms" on the kernel disk (KEN and DMR).