[TUHS] earliest Unix roff

[Larry McVoy]

In retrospect having / be roots home is a super bad idea but I think it
was fairly common practice, /root became a thing as idiots like me 
messed things up :)

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:26:34PM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
> I???ve forgotten but it could have been early on. Having /root as the super users home directory was on later systems. I thought Masscomp did that but I might be thinking Stellar by then.  
> 
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
> 
> > On Sep 16, 2019, at 9:17 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> >>> On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
> >>> One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour
> >>> and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save
> >>> my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two
> >>> things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of
> >>> paper
> >>> on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed
> >>> and picked up my highliter...
> >> 
> >> This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost the
> >> same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a
> >> "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the
> >> entire thing after the file got corrupted.
> > 
> > I think we have all been there.  Something always goes wrong.  I wrote 
> > a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /.
> > I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition.
> > Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us?  Anyway, I did a
> > cd something
> > and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf .
> > Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together.
> > This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green.

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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm